ust from the poets, who are fain to tell all the ill
they can of human nature, because it makes better poetry than good.

The remark was taken up, as might have been expected, by a young
champion, who thought, or said without thinking, that friendship was--I
really cannot undertake to say what, but all the things that young
ladies usually put into their themes at school: something interminable,
illimitable, and immutable. From this the discussion grew; and how it
was, and what it was, went on to be discussed. I cannot pursue the
thread of the discourse; but the amount of it was this:--One thought
friendship was the summer portion only of the blessed; a flower for the
brow of the prosperous, that the child of misfortune must never gather.
Another thought that all interest being destructive to its very essence,
it could not be trusted, unless there was an utter destitution of every
thing that might recommend us to favor, or requite affection. This lady
must have been brought to the depth of wretchedness ere she ever could
be sure she had a friend. Some, I found, thought it was made up of a
great deal of sensibility, vulgarly called jealousy; that was, to take
umbrage at every seeming slight, to the indescribable torment of either
party. Some betrayed, if they did not exactly say it, that they thought
friendship such an absolute unity, that it would be a less crime to
worship two gods than to love two friends! Therefore, to bring it to its
perfection, it was necessary that all beside should be despised and
disregarded.

Others, very young, and of course soon to grow wiser, thought it
consisted in the exact disclosure of your own concerns and those of
every body else with which you might chance to become acquainted;
others, that it required such exact conformity in opinion, thought, and
feeling, as should make it impossible to differ; and others, that it
implied such generous interference, even with the feelings as well as
affairs of its object, that it should spend itself in disinterested
reproaches and unasked advice. But, however differing else, all were
sure that friendship but usurped the name, unless it were purely
disinterested, endlessly durable, and beyond the reach of time and
circumstances to change it; and all were going forth in the full
certainty of finding friends, each one after the pattern of her own
imagination, the first speaker only excepted, who was fully determined
never to find any, or never to trust