which is the soul of friendship; and Endamidas simply acted on the conviction that because Aretheus and Charixenus were his friends, therefore their love for him was without selfishness, and they would rejoice in the privilege of showing it to be so.

Yet because friendship may thus be rested on as always essentially unselfish, it does not follow that a friend will be willing to put friendship to any such test unnecessarily. The unselfishness of his friendship will forbid that. Therefore it is that a considerate friend is prompter to carry his friend's sorrow, than to carry his sorrows to his friend. "It would seem," says Aristotle, "that we ought to invite friends to share our prosperity with alacrity; . . . but to share our adversity, we should invite them with reluctance." And Sir Thomas Browne, who was ever ready to put his friend's welfare before his own, said, similarly: "Now with my friend I desire not to share or to participate, but to engross, his sorrows." His friend's joys he would share, and his joys he would share with his friend; but his sorrows he would carry by himself, and his friend's sorrows he would carry also, if he might. Whether, indeed, one confides his griefs to his friend or conceals his griefs from his friend, he is moved by the thought of what will please or advantage his friend, rather than of what will please or advantage himself.

Charles Kingsley tells the story, as a veritable fact, of two hermit-monks who had lived together in closest friendship for years in the same cave, with never a thought of envy or selfish rivalry in the mind of either. At last it occurred to them to try the experiment of a quarrel, after the common fashion of the outside world.

"But

how shall we quarrel?" asked one. "Oh!" said the other, "we can take this brick, and put it between us; and each can claim it. Then we'll quarrel over it." And that was agreed on as the plan. "This brick is mine," said the one. I hope it is mine," said the other gently. "Well, if it is yours, take it," said the other, who could never hear his friend express a wish for a thing without having a desire to secure it to him accordingly. So that quarrel was a failure-because the friendship was not.

Even in the partial light which shone on immortality in the days of Cicero the question was discussed, whether it was consistent with the truest friendship for one to bewail the loss of his friend by death, since death was a gain to the friend taken away. "Now to be above measure distressed at one's own troubles, is characteristic of the man who loves not his friend but himself,” said Cicero, in arguing against a selfish grief over the death of a friend. And this same view of a friend's duty of self-forgetfulness is in the mind of Goethe, when he says to his friend:

"Death 'tis to part;

'Tis twofold death
To part not hoping
Ever to meet again.

"Thou wouldst rejoice to leave

This hated land behind,

Wert thou not chained to me

With friendship's flowery chains.

"Burst them! I'll not repine.

No noble friend

Would stay his fellow-captive,

If means of flight appear.

“The remembrance

Of his dear friend's freedom
Gives him freedom-

In his dungeon."

Shakespeare goes one step farther in illustration of the self-abnegation which is in the highest affection, in that series of Sonnets which breathes throughout the sentiment of an absorbing friendship. He would not even be remembered after his death, if memory would be a grief to his surviving friend :

"No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Than you shall hear the surly sullen bell
Give warning to the world that I am fled

From this vile world, with vilest worms to dwell:
Nay, if you read this line, remember not

The hand that writ it; for I love you so

That I in your sweet thoughts would be forgot

If thinking on me then should cause you woe."

He who is capable of being a friend will, because he is a friend, find a joy in serving that he could never find in being served. Out-going is always preferable to in-coming, in friendship's thought. Thus it is with Browning's Jules the artist, in "Pippa Passes," when he considers whether or not he shall become the friend of the untutored Greek girl Phene. Because he can do for her, not because he can hope to receive from her, he decides to be her friend. Therefore it is that he hears

God's voice summoning him to this grandly unselfish

service of friendship:

"If whoever loves

Must be, in some sort, god or worshiper,

The blessing or the blest one, queen or page,

Why should we always choose the page's part?
Here is a woman with utter need of me,—

I find myself queen here, it seems!

How strange!

Look at the woman here with the new soul,
Like my own Psyche,―fresh upon her lips
Alit, the visionary butterfly,

Waiting my word to enter and make bright,

Or flutter off and leave all blank as first.
This body had no soul before, but slept
Or stirred, was beauteous or ungainly, free
From taint or foul with stain, as outward things
Fastened their image on its passiveness:
Now it will wake, feel, live-or die again!
Shall to produce form out of unshaped stuff,
Be Art-and further, to evoke a soul

From form, be nothing? This new soul is mine!"

Nor is this high standard of unselfish personal friendship one which is never practically attained in this matter-of-fact world of ours. Friends have lived for each other. Friends have died for each other. Friends have endured far more than death in each other's behalf. Friends have given up home, and kindred, and property, and hope of gain, and even good name, at the call of friendship. And wherever there is a real friendship today there is a readiness to do and to endure and to yield to the uttermost.

RIENDSHIP being in its very nature an unselfish love, all that savors of selfishness is necessarily excluded from its scope. It being an out-going and an on-going love for one who is prized for his own sake, every added proof that the one loved is all that the loving one has seen him to be, or more, gives joy of heart, and not disturbance of mind, to him who is his friend. Neither envy nor distrust-both of which have their center in self-interest-can have any play against one who is loved unselfishly.

He who is loved as a friend for his own sake, will continue to be thus loved while he is himself and his friend is his friend's self. Thus Montaigne accounts for his love for his friend by saying, "If a man should importune me to give a reason why I loved my friend, I find it could not otherwise be expressed than by the answer, 'Because he was he; because I was I.'" And this is in full accord with Aristotle's declaration that friendship is love for