rather than in their dutifulness as brother and sister. The joint canonization of St. Benedict and St. Scholastica bears even more emphatic witness to the love which united them in a sacred friendship than to the tie which had bound them through their birth from the same mother. And how many brothers and sisters have gained a higher plane and a nobler place through their becoming friends! Bishop Burnet said of Catherine, Countess of Ranelagh, and her brother Robert Boyle, the eminent experimental philosopher: "Such a sister became such a brother; and it was but suitable to both their characters, that they should have improved the relation under which they were born, to the more exalted and endearing one of friend." And a similar record of progress from mere fraternal affection to the truest and most devoted friendship might be made of Philip and Mary Sidney, of William and Caroline Herschel, of Ernest and Charlotte Schleiermacher, of Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, of Charles and Mary Lamb, of William and Dorothy Wordsworth, and of many another well-known and affectionate brother and sister; or again of devoted sisters, such as Hannah and Martha More, or Charlotte, Anne, and Emily Bronté.

If a husband be truly the friend of his wife,—as he ought to be, his love for her as a friend could be just as strong, just as tender, just as permanent and unswerving, if she were not his wife nor ever might be. It is such a friendship as this which gives a superadded joy—in its then abounding opportunities and unhindered privileges of freest expression—to the rarest blessings attainable in the closest and holiest of all human companionships.

A gleam of such wedded friendship would seem to

show itself in the records of Mausolus and Artemisia, of Shah Jehan and Nour Jehan, of Seneca and Paulina, of Giambattista Zappi and Faustina Maratti, of M. and Mme. Roland, of Julius Mohl and Mary Clarke, of Herder and his Caroline, of John and Lucy Hutchinson, of John Flaxman and Ann Denman, of Sir William and Lady Hamilton, of Baron Bunsen and Frances Waddington, of Earl and Lady Beaconsfield, of John Stuart Mill and Mrs. Taylor, of Charles Kingsley and Fanny Grenfell, of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett, of William Ewart Gladstone and Catherine Glynne, and of many another "happy couple . . . making one life double, because they made a double life one."

Wilhelm von Humboldt was a model friend as a friend, in his constancy and unswerving attachment. And this spirit of friendship showed itself in his married life as well as in his other spheres of affection. "When he had attained the certainty that Caroline von Dacheröden was to be his wife," says his biographer, "he immediately made the vow to make her happy under any circumstances;" not to seek his own happiness, nor yet to seek the mutual happiness of the two, but to live for her happiness, as her true friend. "He never forgot this vow during his whole life, and fulfilled it faithfully to the best of his ability." When, soon after his marriage, his wife's life was in imminent peril, he deliberately purposed suicide, and “gave as a reason for his suicidal purpose, that he could not tell whether the beloved one might not stand in need of him in the future life." Not that he must seek her society for his own sake, in another world, but that he must be at hand in the hope of yet serving her there.

She recovered, however, and "during the long years that his wife lived with him on earth, and constituted his greatest happiness, this zeal continued in every circumstance of life, to the complete negation and forgetfulness of self, sacrificing even privileges which would seem inseparable from such an excess of love." He was all the more a friend to his wife through being meanwhile so truly and purely a friend to a woman whom he knew before he was a lover or a husband.

A true friendship between a husband and a wife may precede the love which led to their marriage union, or, again, it may follow that love as the choicest of its incidental results; but whether it come earlier or later than mere wedded love as such, there, as everywhere, the love which is friendship transcends all other loves. Of the friendship which follows wedded love as the richest blessing of a marriage union, Chateaubriand, writing of the danger of a diminution of the power of love by "the fever of time, which produces lassitude, dissipates illusion, undermines our passions, withers our loves, and changes our hearts even as it changes our locks and years," says earnestly: "There is but one exception to this human infirmity. There sometimes occurs in a strong soul a love firm enough to transform itself into impassioned friendship, so as to become a duty, and appropriate the qualities of virtue. Then, neutralizing the weakness of nature, it acquires the immortality of a principle."

Of the friendship which precedes wedded love, and which shines transcendent through and above it, no better description is needed than that supplied in the graceful dedication to her husband, of a volume of her poems,

by one who has written with a woman's tenderness and a woman's truth:

"A year ago to-day, love, for the space

Of a brief, sudden moment, richly fraught

With deeper meaning than our light hearts thought,
You held my hand and looked into the face

Which, poor in gifts, has since by God's good grace
Grown dear to you; and the full year has brought
Friendship, and love, and marriage; yet has taught
My heart to call you in its sacred place

Still by the earliest name;-for you who are My lover and my husband, and who bring Heaven close around me, will not let me cling To that near heaven; but tempt my soul afar By your ideals for me;-till life end, My calm, dispassionate, sincerest friend.' Wherever there is a pure and unselfish love for another for that other's own sake, a love contingent neither on its return nor on its recognition, there is a true friendship, whether there be any other relation than this between the loving and the loved, or not. Friendship is, in fact, distinct from even the choicest other relationship with which it may coexist.

1 Alice Wellington Rollins.

II.

FRIENDSHIP IN HISTORY.