o be together,
you win his confidence by a frankness that would perhaps considerably
surprise your nearest neighbors and relations. This is due to the
shortness of the opportunity; but with people who live in the same
place, you will proceed much more deliberately.

Whoever would remain regularly provided with intellectual friends, ought
to arrange a succession of friendships, as gardeners do with peas and
strawberries, so that, whilst some are fully ripe, others should be
ripening to replace them. This doctrine sounds like blasphemy against
friendship; but it is not intended to apply to the sacred friendship of
the heart, which ought to be permanent like marriage, only to the
friendship of the head, which is of the utmost utility to culture, yet
in its nature temporary. I know a distinguished Englishman who is quite
remarkable for the talent with which he arranges his intellectual
friendships, so as never to be dependent on any one, but always sure of
the intercourse he needs, both now and in the future. He will never be
isolated, never without some fresh and living interest in humanity. It
may seem to you that there is a lamentable want of faith in this; and I
grant at once that a system of this kind does presuppose the extinction
of the boyish belief in the permanence of human relations; still, it
indicates a large-minded confidence in the value of human intercourse,
an enjoyment of the present, a hope for the future, and a right
appreciation of the past.

Nothing is more beautiful in the intellectual life than the willingness
of all cultivated people--unless they happen to be accidentally soured
by circumstances that have made them wretched--to communicate to others
the results of all their toil. It is true that they apparently lose
nothing by the process, and that a rich man who gives some portion of
his material wealth exercises a greater self-denial; still, when you
consider that men of culture, in teaching others, abandon something of
their relative superiority, and often voluntarily incur the sacrifice
of what is most precious to them, namely, their time, I think you will
admit that their readiness in this kind of generosity is one of the
finest characteristics of highly-developed humanity. Of all intellectual
friendships, none are so beautiful as those which subsist between old
and ripe men and their younger brethren in science, or literature, or
art. It is by these private friendships, even more than by publ