and faith, let us at least resist our temptations; let us enter into the state of war, and wake Thor and Wodin, courage and constancy, in our breast. This is to be done in our smooth times by speaking the truth. Check this lying hospitality and lying affection. Live no longer to the expectation of those deceived and deceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O father! O mother! O wife! O brother! O friend! I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Be it known unto you that henceforward I obey no law less than the eternal law. I shall endeavor to nourish my parents, to support my family, to be the chaste husband of one wife; but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I can not break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you can not, I will still seek to deserve that you should I must be myself. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. I will so trust that what is deep is holy, that I will do strongly before the sun and moon whatever inly rejoices me and my heart appoints. If you are noble, I will love you; if you are not, I will not hurt you and myself by hypocritical attentions. If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all men's, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to say? You will soon love what is dictated by your nature as well as mine; and if we follow the truth it will bring us out safe at last. But so -you may give these friends pain. Yes; but I can not sell my liberty to save their sensibility. Besides, all persons have their moments of reason, when they look out into the region of absolute truth; then will they justify me, and do the same thing.

"The populace think that your rejection of popular

standards is a rejection of all standard, and the bold sensualist will use the same philosophy to gild his crimes. But the law of consciousness abides. There are two confessionals, in one or the other of which we must be shriven. You may fulfill your round of duties by clearing yourself in the direct or in the reflex way. Consider whether you have satisfied your relations to father, cousin, neighbor, town, cat, and dog, and whether any of these can upbraid you. But I may also neglect this reflex standard, and absolve me to myself. I have my own stern claims and perfect will. It denies the name of duty to many offices. that are called duties. But if I can discharge its debts, it enables me to dispense with the popular code. If any body imagines that this law is lax, let him keep its commandment for one day.

"And truly it demands something godlike in him who has cast off the common motives of humanity, and has ventured to trust himself for a task-master. High be his heart, faithful his will, clear his sight, that he may in good earnest be doctrine, society, law to himself, that a simple purpose may be to him as strong as iron necessity to others.

"If any man consider the present aspects of what is called, by distinction, society, he will see the need of these ethics."

I must remark, that if any one will seriously observe human nature as it commonly is, he will easily see that a moral code such as Emerson's would produce conceited and selfish beings, and that it is merely calculated for natures as pure and beautiful as his own, and which form the exception to the general rule. That which he in all cases mistakes is the radical duality of human nature. Yet with what freshness, invigoration, does not this exclamation come to our souls, "Be true; be yourself!" Especially when coming from a man who has given proofs that in this truth a human being may fulfill all his hu

man duties as son, brother, husband, father, friend, citizen. But a true Christian does all this, and-something more.

I must give you two examples of Emerson's doctrines, as relates to the relationship of friend with friend, and on friendship; because they accord with my own feelings, and act as an impulse in the path which for some time I have chosen for myself.

"Friendship requires that rare mean between likeness and unlikeness that piques each with the presence of power and of consent in the other party. Let me be alone to the end of the world, rather than that my friend should overstep by a word or a look his real sympathy. I am equally balked by antagonism and by compliance. Let him not cease an instant to be himself. The only joy I have in his being mine is that the not mine is mine. It turns the stomach, it blots the daylight-when I looked for a manly furtherance, or, at least, a manly resistance -to find a mush of concession. Better be a nettle in the side of your friend than his echo. The condition which high friendship demands is, ability to do without it. To be capable of that high office requires great and sublime parts. There must be my two before there can be my one. Let it be an alliance of two large, formidable natures, mutually beheld, mutually feared, before yet they recognize the deep identity which beneath their disparities unites them.

"He is only fit for this society who is magnanimous. He must be so to know its law. He must be one who is sure that greatness and goodness are always economy. He must be one who is not swift to intermeddle with his fortunes. Let him not dare to intermeddle with this. Leave to the diamond its ages to grow, nor expect to accelerate the births of the eternal. Friendship demands a religious treatment. We must not be willful, we must not provide. We talk of choosing our friends, but our friends are self-elected: Reverence is a great part of it

Treat your friend as a spectacle. Of course, if he be a man, he has merits that are not yours, and that you can not honor. If you must needs hold him close to your person, stand aside-give those merits room-let them mount and expand. Be not so much his friend that you can never know his peculiar energies, like fond mammas who shut up their boy in the house until he has almost grown a girl. Are you the friend of your friend's buttons or of his thought? To a great heart he will still be a stranger in a thousand particulars, that he may come near in the holiest ground. Leave it to boys and girls to regard a friend as a property, and to suck a short and allconfounding pleasure instead of the pure nectar of God.

*

"A friend is a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him I may think aloud. I am arrived at last in the presence of a man so real, so equal, that I may drop even those undermost garments of dissimulation, courtesy, and second thought, which men never put off, and may deal with him with the simplicity and wholeness with which one chemical atom meets another.

*

"Let us buy our entrance to this guild by a long probation. Why should we desecrate noble and beautiful souls by intruding on them? Why insist on rash personal relations with your friend? Why go to his house, and know his mother, and brother, and sisters? Why be visited by him at your own? Are these things material to our covenant? Leave this touching and clawing. Let him be to me as a spirit. A message, a thought, a sin cerity, a glance from him I want; but not news nor pottage. I can get politics, and chat, and neighborly conveniences from cheaper companions. Should not the society of my friend be to me poetic, pure, universal, and quiet as Nature herself? Ought I to feel that our tie is profane in comparison with yonder bar of cloud that sleeps

on the horizon, or that clump of waving grass that di vides the brook? Let us not vilify, but raise it to that standard.

"Worship his superiorities. Wish him not less by a thought, but hoard and tell him all. Guard him as thy great counterpart; have a princedom to thy friend. Let him be to thee forever a sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency to be soon outgrown and cast aside.

*

Let us not interfere. Who

"What is so great as friendship, let us carry with what grandeur of spirit we can. Let us be silent, so we may hear the whisper of the gods. set you to cast about what you should say to the select souls, or to say any thing to such? No matter how ingenious, no matter how graceful and bland. There are innumerable degrees of folly and wisdom, and for you to say aught is to be frivolous. Wait, and thy soul shall speak. Wait until the necessary and everlasting overpowers you, until day and night avail themselves of your lips.

"Vain to hope to come nearer to a man by getting into his house. If unlike, his soul only flies the faster from you, and you shall catch never a true glance of his eye. We see the noble afar off, and they repel us; why should we intrude? Late-very late-we perceive that no antagonism, no introduction, no consuetudes, or habits of society, should be of any avail to establish us in such relations with them as we desire-but solely the uprise of nature in us to the same degree it is in them, then shall we meet as water with water; and if we should not meet. them then, we shall not want them, for we are already they.