he rows of little houses which unfurl and
furl up, and vanish, thank the Lord, into nothingness, while the express
swishes past some dreadful manufacturing town. Another time, some years
ago, the unknown friend was a small boy, a baby almost, jumping and
rolling (a practice intolerable in any child but him) on the seat of a
second-class carriage. We did not speak; in fact my friend had barely
acquired the necessary art. But I felt companioned, befriended,
delivered of the world's crowded solitude.

Apart from railway trains, a similar thing may sometimes happen. And
there are few of us, surely, who do not possess, somewhere in their
life, friends of the highest value whom they have barely known--met with
once or twice perhaps, talked with, and for some reason not met again;
but never lost sight of by heart and fancy--indeed, more often turned
to, and perhaps more deeply trusted (as devout persons trust St. Joseph
and St. Anthony of Padua, whom, after all, they scarcely know more than
their own close kindred) than so many of, ostensibly, our nearest and
dearest. Indeed, this is the meaning of that curious little poem of
Whitman's--"Out of the rolling ocean, the crowd, came a drop gently to
me"--with its Emersonian readiness to part, "now we have met, we are
safe;" a very wise view of things, if our poor human weakness really
wanted safety, and did not merely want "more"--indeed, like that human
little boy, want "too much."

But to return to the friendships, consoling, comforting intimacies,
which we can have not merely with strangers never met again, or never,
meeting, spoken with; but even more satisfactorily with those beloved
ones whom, from our own lack of soul, of _anima_ drawing forth _anima_,
we dully call inanimates. I am not speaking, of course, of the real
passions with which exceptionally lovely or wonderful spots or
monuments, views of distant Alps, or certain rocky southern coasts, or
St. Mark's or Amiens Cathedral, great sirens among voiceless things,
subjugate and draw our souls. The friendships in question are sober and
deliberate, founded on reasonable recognition of some trait of dignity
or grace; and matured by conscious courtship on our part, retracing of
steps day by day, and watching the friend's varying moods at noon or
under low lights. During that week in the grim Scottish ancestral house,
it was the kitchen-garden, as I began by saying, which comforted me. In
another place, where I was ill and