l that we two have shared,
The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,
When we have chid the hasty-footed time
For parting us, O! is all forgot?
All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence?
We, Hermia, like two artificial gods,
Have with our needles ccreated both one flower,
Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,
Both warbling of one song, both in one key,
As if our hands, our sides; voices, and minds
Had been incorporate. So we grew together,
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries moulded on one stem:
So with two seeming bodies, but one heart;
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one and crowned with one crest.
And will you rend our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend?

Romantically warm and generous as the friendships of school-boys are,
those of school-girls are much more so. They are more purposed and
absorbing, more sedulously cultivated and consciously important.
School-girls often have their distinctly defined and well-understood
degrees of intimacy--their first, their second, their third, friend.
Thus a thousand little dramas are daily played, full of delights and
woes, of which outsiders, who have no key to them, never so much as
dream. Probably no chapter of sentiment in modern fashionable life is
so intense and rich as that which covers the experience of budding
maidens at school. In their mental caresses, spiritual nuptials,
their thoughts kiss each other, and more than all the blessedness the
world will ever give them is foreshadowed. They have not yet reached
the age for a public record or confession of their pangs and
raptures; so these dramas are for the most part only guessed at. But
keener agonies, more delicious passages, are nowhere else known than
in the bosoms of innocent school-girls, in the lacerations or
fruitions of their first consciously given affections. A startling
illustration has come to the knowledge of the writer just as he is
penning these words. Two girls, about sixteen years old, attending a
private school together, in one of the chief cities of the United
States, formed a strong attachment to each other, and were almost
inseparable. The father of one of the girls, for some reason, had a
dislike for the other, and forbade his daughter to associate with
her. The two friends preferred death to separation. They took
laudanum, and were found dead in each other's arms