XIV.] or YOUTH AND AGE. 271 be nothing but a principle which is hostile to all that most adorns this sublunary scene, that would with violence and despotic rule mar the fairest flower that creation has to boast.
It happens therefore almost unavoidably that, when the man mature looks back upon the little incidents of his youth, he sees them to a surprising degree in the same light, and forms the same con- clusions respecting them, as he did when they were actually passing. " The forgeries of opinion,'* says Cicero, " speedily pass away; but the rules and de- cisions of nature are strengthened." Bitter re- proaches and acts of violence are the offspring of perturbation engendered upon imbecility, and there- fore can never be approved upon a sober and im- partial revision. And, if they are to be impeached in the judgment of an equal and indifferent observer, we may be sure they will be emphatically condemned by the grave and enlightened censor who looks back upon the years of his own nonage, and recollects that he was himself the victim of the intemperance to be pronounced upon. The interest that he must necessarily take in the scenes in which he once had an engrossing concern, will supply peculiar lumi- nousness to his views. He taxes himself to be just. The transaction is over now, and is passed to the events that preceded the universal deluge. He holds the balance with a steadiness, which sets at defiance all attempts to give it a false direction one way or the other. But the judgment he made on 272 OF YOUTH AND AGE. [ESSAY the case at the time, and immediately after the hu- miliation he suffered, remains with him. It was the sentiment of his ripening youth; it was the opinion of his opening manhood; and it still attends him, when he is already fast yielding to the incroach- ments and irresistible assaults of declining years.
XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 2/3 ESSAY XV.
OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP.
Who is it that says, " There is no love but among equals?" Be it who it may, it is a saying universally known, and that is in every one's mouth. The contrary is precisely the truth, and is the great secret of every thing that is admirable in our moral nature.
By love it is my intention here to understand, not a calm, tranquil, and, as it were, half-pronounced feeling, but a passion of the mind. We may doubt- less entertain an approbation of other men, without adverting to the question how they stand in relation to ourselves, as equals or otherwise: But the sen- timent I am here considering, is that where the person in whom it resides most strongly sympathises with the joys and sorrows of another, desires his gratification, hopes for his welfare, and shrinks from the anticipation of his being injured; in a word, is the sentiment which has most the spirit of sacrifice in it, and prepares the person in whom it dwells, to postpone his own advantage to the ad- vantage of him who is the object of it.
Having placed love among the passions, which is no vehement assumption, I then say, there can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where T 274 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [eSSAY there is not imagination. In cases where every thing is understood, and measured, and reduced to rule, love is out of the question. Whenever this sentiment prevails, I must have my attention fixed more on the absent than the present, more upon what I do not see than on what I do see. My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image. Senti- ment is i]iothing, till you have arrived at a mystery and d, veil^ something that is seen obscurely, that is just hinted at in the distance, that has neither cer- tain outline nor colour, but that is left for the mind to fill up according to its pleasure and in the beat manner it is able.
The great model of the aflfection of love in human beings, is the sentiment which subsists between pa- rents and children.
Let not this appear a paradox. There is another relation in human society to which this epithet has more emphatically been given: but, if we analyse the matter strictly, we shall find that all that is most sacred and beautiful in the passion between the sexes, has relation to offspring. What Milton calls, "The rites mysterious of connubial love," would have little charm in them in reflection, to a mind one degree above the brutes, were it not for the mystery they include, of their tendency to give existence to a new human creature like ourselves. Were it not for this circumstance, a man and a wo- XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 2/5 man would hardly ever have learned to live together; there scarcely could have been such a thing as do- mestic society; but every intercourse of this sort would have been ^^ casual^ joyless^ unendeared;" and the propensity would have brought along with it nothing more of beauty, lustre and grace, than the pare animal appetites of hunger and thirst. Bearing in mind these considerations, I do not therefore hesitate to say, that the great model of the aflPec- tion of love in human beings, is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.
The original feature in this sentiment is the con- scious feeling of the protector and the protected. Our passions cannot subsist in lazy indolence; pas- sion and action must operate on each other \ passion must produce action, and action gire strength to the tide of passion. We do not vehemently desire, where we can do nothing. It is in a very faint way that I entertain a wish to possess the faculty of fly- ing; and an ordinary man can scarcely be said to desire to be a king or an emperor. None but a madman, of plebeian rank, falls in love with a prin- cess. But shew me a good thing within my reach; convince me that it is in my power to attain it; de- monstrate to me that it is fit for me, and I am fit for it; then begins the career of passion. In the same manner, I cannot love a person vehemently, and strongly interest myself in his miscarriages or success, till I feel that I can be something to him.- Love cannot dwell in a state of impotence. To T 2 276 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [essAY affect and be affected, this is the common nature I require; this is the being that is like unto myself; all other likeness resides in the logic and the defini- tion, but has nothing to do with feeling or with practice.
What can be more clear and sound in explana- tion, than the love of a parent to his child? The affection he bears and its counterpart are the orna- ments of the world, and the spring of every thing that makes life worth having. Whatever besides has a tendency to illustrate and honour our nature, descends from these, or is copied from these, grows out of them as the branches of a tree from the trunk, or is formed upon them as a model, and de- rives from them its shape, its character, and its soul. Yet there are men so industrious and expert to strip the world we live in of all that adorns it, that they can see nothing glorious in these affections, but find the one to be all selfishness, and the other all pre- judice and superstition.
The lOve of the parent to his child is nursed and fostered by two plain considerations; first, that the subject is capable of receiving much, and secondly, that my power concerning it is great and extensive.
When an infant is presented to my observation, what a wide field of sentiment and reflection is opened to me! Few minds are industrious and ductile enough completely to compass this field, if the infant is only accidentally brought under their view. But, if it is an infant with which I begin to XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 277 be acquainted to-day, and my acquaintance with which shall not end perhaps till one of us ceases to exist, how is it possible that the view of its little figure should not lead me to the meditation of its future history, the successive stages of human life, and the various scenes and mutations and vicissi- tudes and fortunes through which it is destined to pass? The Book of Fate lies open before me. This infant, powerless, and almost impassive now, is re- served for many sorrows and many joys, and will one day possess a power, formidable and fearful to afflict those within its reach, or calculated to diffuse blessings, wisdom, virtue, happiness, to all around. I conceive all the various destinations of which man is susceptible; my fancy at least is free to select that which pleases me best; I unfold and pursue it in all its directions, observe the thorns and difficul- ties with which it is beset, and conjure up to my thoughts all that it can boast of inviting, delightful and honourable.
But if the infant that is near to me lays hold of my imagination and affections at the moment in which he falls under my observation, how much more do I become interested in him, as he advances from year to year! At first, I have the blessing of the gospel upon me, in that, " having not seen, yet I believe.'* But, as his powers expand, I understand him better. His little eye begins to sparkle with meaning; his tongue tells a tale that may be under- stood; his very tones, and gestures, and attitudes.
278 OF LOVE ANP FRIENDSHIP. [eSSAY all inform me concerning what he shall be. I am like a florist^ who has received a strange plant from a distant country. At first he sees only the stalk, and the leaves, and the bud having yet no other colour than that of the leaves. But as he watches his plant from day to day, and from hour to hour, the case which contains the flower divides, and be*- trays first one colour and then another, till the shell gradually subsides more and more towards the stalk, and the figure of the flower begins now to be seen, and its radiance and its pride to expand itself to the ravished observer. — ^Every lesson that the child learns, every comment that he makes upon it, every sport that he pursues, every choice that he exerts, the demeanour that he adopts to his playfellows, the modifications and character of his little fits of authority or submission, all make him more and more an individual to me, and open a wider field for my sagacity or my prophecy, as to what he pro- mises to be, and what he may be made.
But what gives, as has already been observed, the point and the finish to all the interest I take re- specting him, lies in the vast power I possess to influence and direct his character and his fortune. At first it is abstract power; but, when it has already been exerted (as the writers on politics as a science have observed of property), the sweat of my brow becomes mingled with the apple I have gathered, and my interest is greater. No one understands my views and projects entirely but myself, and the XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 279 scheme I have conceived will suflFer, if I do not com^ plete it as I began.
And there are men that say, that all this mystery, the most beautiful attitude of human nature, and the crown of its glory, is pure' selfishness!
Let us now turn from the view of the parental, to that of the filial affection.
The great mistake that has been made on this subject, arises from the taking it nakedly and as a mere abstraction. It has been sagely remarked, that when my father did that which occasioned me to come into existence, he intended me no benefit, and therefore I owe him no thanks. And the inference which has been made from this wise position is, that the duty of children to parents is a mere imposture, a trick, employed by the old to defraud the young out of their services. ^ I grant most readily, that the mere material liga- ment that binds together the father and the child, by itself is worthless, and that he who owes nothing more than this to his father, owes him nothing. The natural, unanimated relationship is Uke the grain of mustard-seed in the discourses of Jesus Christ, " which indeed is the least of all seeds; but, when it is unfolded and grows up, it becomes a mighty tree, so that the birds of the air may come and lodge in its branches."
The hard and insensible man may know little of the debt he owes to his father; but he that is ca- pable of calling up the past, and beholding the 280 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [eSSAY things that are not as if they now were, will see the matter in a very different light. Incalculable are the privations (in a great majority of instances), the toils, the pains, the anxieties, that every child im- poses on his father from the first hour of his ex- istence. If he could know the ceaseless cares, the tender and ardent feelings, the almost incredible efforts and exertions, that have accompanied him in his father s breast through the whole period of his growth, instead of thinking that he owed his parent nothing, he would stand still and wonder that one human creature could do so much for an- other.
I grant that all this may be done for a child by a stranger, and that then in one sense the obligation would be greater. It is however barely possible that all this should be done. The stranger wants the first exciting cause, the consideration, "This creature by the great scheme of nature belongs to me, and is cast upon my care.'' And, as the tie in the case of the stranger was not complete in the beginning, so neither can it be made so in the se* quel. The little straggler is like the duckling hatched, in the nest of a hen; there is danger every day, that as the nursling begins to be acquainted with its own qualities, it may plunge itself into another element, and swim away from its bene- factor.
Even if we put all these considerations out of the question, still the affection of the child to its parent XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 281 of adoption, wants the kernel, and, if I may so speak, the soul, of the connection which has been formed and modelled by the great hand of nature. If the mere circumstance of filiation and descent creates no debt, it however is the principle of a very close connection. One of the most memorable mysteries of nature, is how, out of the slightest of all connections (for such, literally speaking, is that between father and child), so many coincidences should arise. The child resembles his parent in feature, in temperament, in turn of mind, and in class of disposition, while at the same time in many particulars, in these same respects, he is a new and individual creature. In one view therefore the child is merely the father multiplied and repeated. Now one of the indefeasible principles of affection is the partaking of a common nature; and as man is a species by himself, so to a certain degree is every nation and every family; and this considera- tion, when added to the moral and spiritual ties already treated of, undoubtedly has a tendency to give them their zest and perfection.
But even this is not the most agreeable point of view in which we may consider the filial affection. I come back to my first position, that where there is no imagination, there can be no passion, and by consequence no love. No parent ever underst:ood his child, and no child ever understood his parent. We have seen that the aff*ectionate parent consi- ders his child like a flower in the bud, as a mine of 282 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [eSSAY power that is to be unfolded^ as a creature that is to act and to pass through he knows not what, as a canvas that '^ gives ample room and verge enough,** for his prophetic soul to hang over in endless vi- sions, and his intellectual pencil to fill up with va- rious scenes and fortunes. And, if the parent does not understand his child, certainly as little does the child understand his parent. Wherever. this rela- tion subsists in its fairest form, the parent is as a God, a being qualified with supernatural powers, to liis offspring. The child consults his father as an oracle; to him he proposes all his little questions; from him he learns his natural philosophy, his mo- rals, his rules of conduct, his religion, and his creed. The boy is uninformed on every point; and the fa- ther is a vast Encyclopedia, not merely of sciences, but of feelings, of sagacity, of practical wisdom, and of justice, which the son consults on all occasions, and never consults in vain. Senseless and inexpert is that parent, who endeavours to govern the mind by authority, and to lay down rugged and peremp- tory dogmas to his child; the child is fully and un- avoidably prepared to receive every thing with un- bounded deference, and to place total reliance in the oracle which nature has assigned him. Habits, how beautiful! Inestimable benefit of nature, that has given me a prop against which to sustain my un- ripened strength, and has not turned me loose to wander with tottering steps amidst the vast desert of society!
XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 283 But it is not merely for contemplative wisdom that the child honours his parent; he sees in him a vast fund of love, attachment and sympathy. That he cannot mistake; and it is all a mystery to him. He says^ What am I, that I should be the object of this? and whence comes it? He sees neither the fountain from which it springs, nor the banks that confine it. To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore.
To the bounty of its operations he trusts impli* citly. The stores of judgment and knowledge he finds i]Q his father, prompt him to trust it. In many instances where it appeared at first obscure and enigmatical, the event has taught him to acknow* ledge its soundness. The mutinousness of passion will sometimes excite a child to question the de- crees of his parent; it is very long before his un- derstanding, as such, comes to set up a separate system, and teaches him to controvert the decisions of his father.
Perhaps I ought earlier to have stated, that the filial connection we have here to consider, does not include those melancholy instances where some woful defect or utter worthlessness in the parent counteracts the natural course of the afiections, but refers only to cases, where the character of father is on the whole sustained with honour, and the prin- ciple of the connection is left to its true operation. In such cases the child not only observes for him- self the manifestations of wisdom and goodness in 284 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [eSSAY his parent, but is also accustomed to hear well of him from all around. There is a generous conspi- racy in human nature, not to counteract the honour borne by the oflFspring to him from whom he sprung, and the wholsome principle of superiority and dependence which is almost indispensible be- tween persons of diflferent ages dwelling under the same roof. And, exclusively of this consideration, the men who are chiefly seen by the son are his father's friends and associates; and it is the very bent, and, as it were, law of our nature, that we do not associate much, but with persons whom we favour, and who are prepared to mention us with kindness and honour.
Thus every way the child is deeply imbued with veneration for his parent, and forms the habit of regarding him as his book of wisdom, his philoso- pher and guide. He is accustomed to hear him ppoken of as a true friend, an active ally, and a pat- tern of justice and honour; and he finds him so. Now these are the true objects of affection, — wisdom and beneficence; and the human heart loves this beneficence better when it is exercised towards him who loves, first, because inevitably in almost all instances we are best pleased with the good that is done to ourselves, and secondly, because it can scarcely happen but that we in that case understand it best, both in its operation and its effects.
The active principles of religion are all moulded upon this familiar and sensible relation of father XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 285 and child: and to understand what the human heart is capable to conceive on this subject, we have only to refer to the many eloquent and glowing treatises that have been written upon the love of God to his creatures, and the love that the creature in return owes to his God. I am not now considering reli- gion in a speculative point of view, or enquiring among the diflferent sects and systems of religion what it is that is true; but merely producing reli- gion as an example of what have been the concep- tions of the human mind in successive ages of the world on the subject of love.
This All that we behold, the immensity of the universe, the admirable harmony and subtlety of its structure, as they appear in the vastest and the minutest bodies, is considered by religion, as the emanation of pure love, a mighty impulse and ar- dour in its great author to realise the idea existing in his mind, and to produce happiness. The Pro- vidence that watcher over us, so that not a sparrow dies unmarked, and that " the great Sensorium of the world vibrates, if a hair of our head but falls to the ground in the remotest desert of his creation," is still unremitted, never-satiated love. And, to go from this to the peculiarities of the? Christian doc- trine, " Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends: God so loved the world, that he gave his only-begotten Son to suflFer, to be treated contumeliously, and to die with ignominy, that we might live."
286 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [essAY If on the other hand we consider the love which the creature must naturally pay to his creator, we shall find that the affection we can suppose the most ingenuous child to bear to the worthiest pa- rent, is a very faint image of the passion which may be expected to grow out of this relation. In God, as he is represented to us in the books of the wor- thiest divines, is every thing that can command love; wisdom to conceive, power to execute, and beneficence actually to carry into effect, whatever is excellent and admirable. We are lost in con- templating the depth and immensity of his per- fections. " Every good and every perfect gift is from the universal Father, with whom is no vari- ableness, neither shadow of turning.** The most soothing and gratifying of all sentiments, is that of entire confidence in the divine goodness, a reliance which no adversity can shake, and which supports him that entertains it under every calamity, that sees the finger of God in eVery thing that comes to pass, that says, " It is good for me to be afflicted,* believes, that *^ all things work together for bless- ings '* to the pious and the just, and is intimately persuaded that " our light affliction, whi<;h i& but for a moment,* i* the means and the earnest of a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.** If we descend from these great archetypes, the love between parent and child, and between the creator and his creature, we shall still find the same inequality the inseparable attendant upon the XV.] OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. 287 most perfect ties of affection. The ancients seem to have conceived the truest and most exalted ideas on the subject of friendship. Among the most ce- lebrated instances are the friendship of Achilles and Patroclus, Orestes and Pylades, iEneas and Achates^ Cyrus and Araspes^ Alexander and Hephaestion, Scipio and Laelius. In each of these the parties are, the true hero, the man of lofty ambition^ the magnificent personage in whom is concentred every thing that the historian or the poet was able to realise of excellence^ and the modest and unpre- tending individual in whom his confidence was re- posed. The grand secret of the connection is un- folded in the saying of the Macedonian conqueror, " Craterus loves the king; but Hephaestion loves Alexander.*' Friendship is to the loftier mind the repose, the unbending of the soul. The great man (whatever may be the department in which his ex- cellence consists) has enough of his greatness, when he stands before the world, and receives the homage that is paid to his merits. Ever and anon he is anxious to throw aside this incumbrance, and be as a man merely to a man. He wishes to forget the " pride, pomp, and circumstance " of greatness, and to be that only which he is himself. He dc - sires at length to be sure, that he receives no adu- lation, that he is accosted with no insincerity, and that the individual to whose society he has thought proper to withdraw, has no by-ends, no sinister purposes in all his thoughts. What he seeks for, is a true friend, a being who sincerely loves, one .288 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [essAV who is attached to him^ not for the accidents that at- tend him, but for what most strictly belongs to him, and of which he cannot be divested. In this friend there is neither interested intention nor rivalry.
Such are the characteristic features of the supe- rior party in these exemplars of friendship among the ancients. Of the unpretending, unassuming party Homer, the great master of the affections and emotions in remoter ages, has given us the fullest portrait in the character of Patroclus. The distinguishing feature of his disposition is a melt- ing and affectionate spirit, the concentred essence of tenderness and humanity. When Patroclus comes from witnessing the disasters of the Greeks, to collect a report of which he had been sent by Achilles, he is "overwhelmed with floods of tears, like a spring which pours down its waters from the steep edge of a precipice.'* It is thus that Jupiter characterises him when he lies dead in the field of battle '*A')(iXrjos eralpor lire^ves eytfia re, Kparepov re.* It is thus that Menelaus undertakes to excite the Grecian chiefs to rescue his body: Nvv Tis cvrielrjs UaTpoKXrios leiXoto Mvrf(ra(rd(o' irdaiv yap eirl^aro fJi€l\i\os etyai • Thou [addressing himself in his thoughts to Hector] hast slain the friend of Achilles, not less memorable for the blandness of his temper, than the bravery of his deeds.
»> Let each man recollect the sweetness of his disposition: for, as long as he lived, he was unremitted in kindness to all.
,,.^ XV.] OF LOV£ AND FRIENDSHIP. 289 When Achilles proposes the games at the funeral^ he says, " On any other occasion my horses should have started for the prize, but now it cannot be. They have lost their incomparable groom, who was accustomed to refresh their limbs with water, and anoint their flowing manes; and they are inconso- lable.'* Briseis also makes her appearance among the mourners, avowing that, " when her husband had been slain in battle, and her native city laid in ashes, this generous man prevented her tears, aver- ring to her, that she should be the wife of her conqueror, and that he would himself spread the nuptial banquet for her in the hero's native kingdom of Phthia."
The reciprocity which belongs to a friendship between unequals may well be expected to give a higher zest to their union. Each party is neces- sary to the other. The superior considers him towards whom he pours out his affection, as a part of himself.
The head is not more native to the heart. The hand more instrumental to the mouth.
He cannot separate himself from him, but at the cost of a fearful maim. When the world is shut out by him, when he retires into solitude, and falls back upon himself, then his unpretending friend is most of all necessary to him. He is his consolation and his pleasure, the safe coffer in which he re- posits all his anxieties and sorrows. If the principal^ instead of being a public man, is a man ofscience^ u 990 OF LOVE AND FRIENDSHIP. [ESSAY