FRIENDS, AND THEIR FRIENDSHIP.

Otago Witness, Issue 2471, 24 July 1901, Page 67

FRIENDS, AND THEIR FRIENDSHIP.

It would eem upon occaaionb that fiiencta were given us as lessons ir patience and broad charity. Wo ha\e been taught to forgive our enemies : fully as much do we need to learn indulgence in friendship. All friendships based! on selfishness, on personal pleasure, or on usefulness are accidental. They are easily dissolved, because when the pleasure or the utility ceases the bond also oeases. When the motive of the

filch from our friends to offer up on the altar of the world — the people it is necessary to know, "because one is always meeting them." They may be society bores whom one listens to if they are rich, and of influence ; snubs if they are poof "hangers-on," and laughs at in any case — with the Other Man. TLey may be social rivals, who struggle and compete for social puzes, consideration, popularity, position. They may be "a mutual admiration society," pledged by unwritten laws to uphold and flatter one another, and yet forming a critic club at whose every meeting the faults, failings, and mistakes of outsiders are reviewed with the pitiless criticism of the Superior Person. They may be a mere collection of selfish atoms whose sole bonds of (misnamed) "friendship are the fortuitous circumstances which combine to lender their interests, acquaintances, resorts, and amusements identical. Of real peisonal affection, respect, or esteem, there may be absolutely none. They cynically smile at one another's business schemes and social ambitions, laugh at one another's failings, eat one another's dinners, go to one another's "evenings," and clohe the long interchange of social obligations by attending one another's funerals! But in "this ton of worldly or social friendship (so-called) there is not necessarily one ounce of true friendship. Yet every man and woman among us has some rare treasure of friendship which lies unfettered ,by worldliness, unchilled by conventionality, close and warm to the very heart of life, and radiant with the rainbow hues of association, of sympathy, of tenderness, and trust.

Schoolday friendships are usually more vaiying and uncertain with girls than with boys, perhaps because girls are so much mine emotional, and "i-u&U at" friendship with such intensity that disappointment is almost sure to follow. Sometimes, however, these schoolgirl friendships — ripening more slowly — grow with the years and show a constancy, loyalty, and tenderness as beautiful as it is unusual. The very commonest details of life are touched and glorified by this girlish devotion^ They use

you know just what I mean? Not judging me, not superior to my faults, or indulgent to my failings — not austere, because unconscious. She is my embodied conscience without knowing it, the standard by which I measure, the ideal which I try to make real. Yet in some things the dearest goose! As we glow older we want mam fiiends ; Intellectual friends, business friends, emotional friends. You think this wanting in loyalty to one great friendship? Nay. surely not, for the friend whose intellectual tastes may harmonise with and stimulate our own may be one whose religious convictions may render him unable to sympathise with us in questions of religion, or whose temperament may utterly preclude his understanding sympathy in our emotional life. Sometimes, indeed, men and women alike are happy enough to find in one friend a sweetheart traveller congenial on all points : able to sympathise emotionally, stimulate intellectually, and uphold morally — then, what so happy as this perfect friendship? It rr-nders this lifs so sweet that we desire no other life without it. In all our vague yearnings for the afterpeace, that dear companionship is .still pictured, or all is naught. Dear friend, far off, my lost desire, So far, so near in woe and weal ; Oh, loved the most, when niost I feel There is a lower and a higher. The one who first passes into the Silent Land leaves us mourning indeed our pie-M-nt loneliness, yet "eeling a new tie with that unknown future — that Silent Land — a sweet familiar presence in its vague pacredness. a tender welcome that will come between our naked souls and the pure white aloofness of the spirits long since made perfect. Earth, too, holds still continual influence of the friend who has but, . . gone foi a moment, i^ioru this room into the next. For, Behold I drean^ a dream of good And mingle all the world with thee. But that friendship ma\ be all this to us in life and death: there must be some Sacrifices, self-abnegation, much faith and

expanse of whiteness gleaming under the grey and darkening sky. Ah, there's a break overhead! What a beautiful blue! And those white clouds skirting the blue! Ah, now the rift is gone, and the brightness with it! Still, no. What glorious dashes of pink against the dove-grey sky ! A real snow sky, you say. But what blending of colour! Brighter and brighter grows the sky. We cannot help but gaze, when suddenly the whole landscape becomes transformed, glistening under a flood of quivering golden light. It is sunrise on the snow, but wo do not realise the wondrous beauty for fully a minute — not till we see the sun, a ball of living gold, resting just upon the hilltop. Five minutes, just five— then the drab curtains" of the sky are drawn, shutting off all brilliance from the earth. Then, as if the very clouds were falling, down comes the snow, faster, faster, heavier yet, till the neighbours exclaim : " Why, we haven't had such a fall of snow for 18 years! " Now we are watching with eagerness for the melting of the snow, and almost envy the dwellers in the city their outings and their paved streets. With best wishes,— Yours sincerely, VAL.