Friendship adds intelligence to letters. I felt then and feel now the force of the _nisi hoc sciat alter_. In solitary lucubration I might have grown into the accomplished school-master; but I should never have had an ear for the august harmonies which sometimes swell through the terrestrial infidelity of Lucretius, if I had not heard the heroic measures read with the dulcet music of a companion’s voice. I never should have been able, as at a later day, to pore serenely over Goethe’s Iphigenia. I never should have comprehended the enigmas of the _Religio Medici_. I never should have loved the sententious sweetness of Quesnel. I never should have found myself awakened, as at a trumpet’s alarum, by the undoctrinal and vague, but stimulating rhapsodies of Schleiermacher’s _Reden_. I never should have made pilgrimage, as I did long after, from the old capital of Burgundy to the mount where St. Bernard was born. All this I owed to the contagion of a lofty and loving soul. CHAPTER XIV. Parole adorne di lingua piu d’una. Milton. Sonnet IV. Fancy to yourself two enthusiasts sitting under a magnificent liriodendron (pity it is that common usage should have degraded the glory of our _forests_ into a _poplar_; it is no poplar, and even the name tulip-tree has a hybrid sound, half Norman half Anglo-Saxon; “it follows not,” says holy but funny Fuller, “that the foreign tulip is better than the rose because some usurping fancies would prefer it;”) fancy, I say, gentle Alice, and gentle reader, two students of old books under a lofty tree, on a knoll in sight of a broad Southern river, with the bank all bespread with volumes. One of these youths is tall, slender, and—“call it fair, not pale,” because two damask rose-leaves give a hectic beauty to the skin through which the eloquent blood courses almost visibly and all too rapidly. The brown hair, long and neglected, falls about the neck and over the linen collar of a country jacket. The great, liquid eye now rolls and now fixes, and the teeth, which medical observation recognizes as more pearly in consumptives, are disclosed in a speaking smile, as the attenuated and almost dainty fingers turn over the heavy leaves of a Greek folio. The approach of fatal disease (we remember Kirk White and Godman) seems only to quicken the appetency and spiritualize the enjoyment of knowledge. Dewy bushes, birds in the branches, a flock of sheep on the green hill-side, and a squadron of lazy boats in the distance, only aid the pursuit. Study is not confined to cells and conventual towers. _Pedant._ The greatest solitude I ever felt was in a great city; when I was in an old, tumble-down street in London. _Albert._ O give me the open air of heaven! I used to spout speeches in the Virginia mountains, where I could halloo to the echoes and fear no overhearing. But that was when I dreamed of the forum and the senate. It is past!