unkind, thoughtless, or all unconscious, as they may be, —on the part of the one loved. The very capacity for an absolutely unselfish affection includes a keen sensitiveness in the direction of that affection; and no love is more liable to misconception-through its very absence of apparent motive-than a love that is without limit or claim or craving. Hence no one can so deeply wound a true friend as the one to whom a person is a true friend. "The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table" tells of the side door of the heart which enters at once into the secret chambers of one's being, and of the peril of trusting a key to that door to any loved one. "Be very careful to whom you trust one of these keys of the side door," he says. “The fact of possessing one renders those even who are dear to you very terrible at times. . . . Some of them have a scale of your whole nervous system, and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semitones,-touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes his instrument. . . . No stranger can get a great many notes of torture out of a human soul; it takes one that knows it well." Susan Coolidge phrases this same thought more seriously:

"Roses have thorns; and love is thorny too;

And this is love's sharp thorn which guards its flower,—
That our belovèd have the cruel power

To hurt us deeper than all others do.

"The heart attuned to our heart like a charm,
Beat answering beat, as echo answers song,-
If the throb falter, or the pulse beat wrong,
How shall it fail to grieve us or to harm ?”

That there is in the truest friendship a possible call to

this outlay of suffering from a friend's fault or a friend's failure, or from some mutual misunderstanding, is obvious because of the human imperfectness of both the loving and the loved; yet it is also evident that, because a true friendship is in its essence unselfish and unswerving love, therefore the larger the outlay of necessary unselfish performance, or of necessary unselfish endurance, in a friendship, the larger the subjective results of that friendship in the enlarged and ever-enlarging heart that thus loves and does and endures unselfishly.

What if one must generously give himself in love for a friend, in suffering with a friend, and in endurance from a friend:

"A friend is worth all hazards we can run.

Poor is the friendless master of a world:
A world in purchase of a friend is gain."

Rappe

N affection that transcends all loves, and that has ever commanded the highest honor among men, must, inevitably, have its limitations and its imitations. Its limitations will be found in the restricted possibilities of the individual whom it sways, while its imitations are a result of the widespread desire for its supposed advantages.

He who is capable of friendship at its best, cannot be a true friend alike to all. The very intensity of this sentiment demands a positive limit to the extension of its scope. And, on the other hand, many a person who tells of his "host of friends," or of her

"Dear five hundred friends,"

never had, nor ever could be, a friend in the truest sense. The most unselfish and expensive of human affections cannot be for all, or from all, alike. Its exacting demands fix its limitations, its recognized attractiveness multiplies its imitations.

The highest conceivable attainment of a personal friendship is a union of two souls through a mutuality of affection. Such a union is, indeed, an incidental result of the conjunction of two friendships, rather than the primitive aim of either of the two; but it is obvious that a union of this sort is inevitably limited to one person on either side. More than two cannot be one, as two can be.

The suggestion of this truth is found in the words of Moses concerning "thy friend who is as thine own self." It is recognized as a truth of the ages by Aristotle, when he cites as a proverbial symbol of friendship the term, one soul in two bodies." St. Augustine has it in mind as he tells of a friend who has been taken from him: "I thought that my soul and his were but one soul in two bodies: and therefore [at his death] I loathed life because I was unwilling to live by halves."

Montaigne seems to have been reading both Aristotle and St. Augustine, when he writes of the soul-union illustrated in his relation with his friend: "In the friendship I speak of, the souls mix and work themselves into one piece with so perfect a mixture that there is no more sign of a seam by which they were first conjoined. . . The union of such friends, being really perfect, deprives them of all acknowledgment of mutual duties [love being the fulfilling of the law], and makes them loathe and banish from their conversation words of separation, distinction, benefit, obligation, acknowledgment, entreaty, thanks, and the like; all things—wills, thoughts, opinions, goods, wives, children, honors, and lives-being in effect common between them; and that absolute concurrence of affections being no other than one soul in two bodies

(according to that very proper definition of Aristotle), they can neither lend nor give anything to one another."

Dryden had evidently been reading Montaigne, and so gaining lessons from St. Augustine and Aristotle at second hand, when, in his "All for Love," he made Mark Antony tell of his union with his then missing and sorely lamented friend, Dolabella:

"I was his soul; he lived not but in me:

We were so closed within each other's breasts,
The rivets were not found that joined us first,
That did not reach as yet. We were so mixed
As meeting streams, both to ourselves were lost.
We were one mass; we could not give or take
But from the same; for he was I, I he."

It is in joyous appreciation of the interunion of his soul and the soul of his "dear friend," that Shakespeare confesses his inability to divide that united self, even for the purpose of sounding his friend's just praises:

"Oh! how thy worth with manners may I sing

When thou art all the better part of me?

What can mine own praise to mine own self bring?
And what is't but mine own, when I praise thee?"

Even the devout Jeremy Taylor, while insisting that the New Testament idea of friendship is that “charity," or "love," which in its fullest exercise would take in all mankind, recognizes the truth that in its practical application, within the sphere of our being, "this universal friendship . . . must be limited, because we are so ;" and that while we should be "friendly" toward all, "all can