or familiar freedom of composition,
as in their exhibition of power of thought combined with delicacy
and refinement of feeling, and in the frequent expression of ardent
patriotism and strong personal sympathies with public or with private
interests. They are the letters of a man who took a grave view of life,
regarding it "as an affair with which we are charged, which must be
carried through and ended with honor to ourselves." They are the letters
also of a man of strong and faithful affections; and the long series of
them addressed during twenty-five years to the Count Louis de Kergorlay
has, in addition to its interest from its variety of topics, a special
moral value as the record of a close and confidential friendship
maintained in spite of the widest divergence of political opinion during
a period of unusual political excitement. Few men have the temper or the
sentiment requisite for the support of intimate relations under
such conditions. But his friendships occupied a very large place in
Tocqueville's life. In them he found happiness and repose. To one of his
friends he writes in 1844, "The remembrance of you is the more precious
to me because it calms in me all those troubles of the soul that
politics engender." And thus in the most trying passages of his life,
and especially in the discouragement of his later years, the thought
of his friends seems to have been constantly with him, and his
correspondence with them became almost a necessity for his spirit.
His letters, or rather that portion of them which M. de Beaumont has
published, and which must some day be succeeded by a fuller collection,
have thus a double character: they contain the judgments of a wide and
profound thinker on the subjects which interested him, while they show
him in the most amiable and attractive light as a generous and constant
friend. They are not to be compared in wit or elaborate finish with the
brilliant letters of Courier; they have not the striking originality and
terse vigor of those of De Maistre, but they have the grace of simple
and pure feeling, and the worth of clear, manly, high-toned thought. No
one capable of appreciating them can read them without learning to
feel toward their author not merely respect, but also a strong personal
regard. The two following extracts have a special appropriateness to
the present condition of our own country, while at the same time they
display the qualities most characteristic of Tocquevill