Longfellow shows his heroic John Alden as recognizing the superiority of self-abnegating friendship over the purest self-indulgent love. It was when Miles Standish appealed in the name of his friendship to the young lover of Priscilla, to win her for the sturdy chieftain, that the answer came back nobly and generously:

So,

"The name of friendship is sacred;

What you demand in that name, I have not the power to
deny you!"

"Friendship prevailed over love, and Alden went on his errand."

Browning, with his master power as a poet sets forth, in his "Saul," the truth that friendship's love is a revelation and an earnest of the transcendent love of God. David, finding himself helpless in his effort to restore the disordered spirit of the King, gains hope through the suggestion of his own never-failing affection as a friend. "And oh, all my heart how it loved him! but where was the sign? I yearned-'Could I help thee, my father, inventing a bliss, I would add, to that life of the past, both the future and this; I would give thee new life altogether, as good, ages hence, As this moment,—had love but the warrant, love's heart to dispense!'

Then the truth came upon me. No harp more-no song more!

out-broke

'Do I find love so full in my nature, God's ultimate gift,

That I doubt his own love can compete with it? Here, the parts shift?

Here, the creature surpass the Creator,-the end, what Began?
Would I fain in my impotent yearning do all for this man,
And dare doubt he alone shall not help him, who yet alone can ?

I believe it! 'Tis thou, God, that givest, 'tis I who receive :
In the first is the last, in thy will is my power to believe.

See the King-I would help him but cannot, the wishes fall through.

Could I wrestle to raise him from sorrow, grow poor to enrich,
To fill up his life, starve my own out, I would-knowing which,
I know that my service is perfect. Oh, speak through me now!
Would I suffer for him that I love? So wouldst thou-so wilt thou!
So shall crown thee the topmost, ineffablest, uttermost crown—
And thy love fill infinitude wholly, nor leave up nor down
One spot for the creature to stand in!'

And so it is that David, in the outreach of his unselfish love as a friend, comes to a realizing sense of the measureless scope of that Divine love of which friendship is the transcendent image and promise.

Thus always, from the earliest ages to the latest, in sacred writings and in secular, friendship finds its recognition as the pre-eminent and surpassing affection of the human heart. The distinction between the love that craves and seeks, and the friendship that would unfailingly serve, has been perceived, all along the centuries; as it was sententiously expressed by Publius Syrus (and afterwards by Seneca): "Friendship always benefits; but love also injures." Or, as Goethe expands the thought:

"True friendship shows its worth in stern refusal

At the right moment; and strong love sometimes
Heaps the loved one with ruin, when it serves

The will more than the weal of who demands."

"A man who is a friend, such as the name imports,— except the gods nothing transcends him," says the pagan poet Plautus. The Christian illustrator of "holy living'

and "holy dying" finds in friendship "the greatest love, and the greatest usefulness, and the most open communion, and the noblest sufferings, and the most exemplary faithfulness, and the severest truth, and the heartiest counsel, and the greatest union of minds, of which brave men and women are capable." As Katherine Philips, a poet of friendship, sees it,

"'Tis love refined and purged from all its dross;

The next to angel's love, if not the same;

As strong as passion is, though not so gross:
It antedates a glad eternity,

And is a heaven in epitome."

O

LOVE that is not conditioned on reciprocity or recognition; a love that is unselfish, uncraving, ever out-going and ever ongoing; a love that consists in loving

rather than in being loved, and that is based on what the loved one is in himself, not on what he is to the one who loves,-cannot be brought to an end by any act, or by any lack, of another than the one whose best personality it represents and exhibits; nor by him while he is still himself. A true friendship is changeless in all changes. It is like the sun, shining just as truly toward the earth while clouds are between it and our planet, as when the atmosphere is clearest; not like the moon that shines only when it is shined upon.

"True friendship between man and man," says Plato, "is infinite and immortal." Aristotle argues that a friendship in order to be true must have a right basis, and that, having a right basis, a friendship "is, as we might expect, permanent; " that "with respect to time and everything

else it is perfect; that a friendship, "because it is felt for its own sake, continues." Cicero similarly reasons: “If it were expediency that cemented friendships, expediency when changed would dissolve them; but because one's nature can never change, therefore true friendships are eternal." It is of friendship's love that Shakespeare says unqualifiedly :

"Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

Oh, no! it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests, and is never shaken."

Mrs. Browning reiterates this truth in her denial that true love ever knew a change:

"Those never loved,

Who dream that they loved once."

any

The intercourse of true friends is a joy of friendship that increases with its exercise, and that can never cloy the heart. But the intercourse of friends, while a joy of friendship, is not a necessity of friendship. What may be the intercourse of friends is a possibility without end. What must be the intercourse of friends is a possibility without beginning. A change in circumstances, that separates those who rejoiced in the joy of inspiring intercourse, does not change the character or the affection of him who is a true friend. 'Friends, though absent, are still Dryden re-phrases this thought:

present," says Cicero. Cicero.

"The souls of friends like kings in progress are;
Still in their own, though from the palace far.”

"It is sublime," says Emerson, "to feel and say of an