The abandonment of letter-writing between friends is the more to be regretted that, unless our friends are public persons, we receive no news of them indirectly; therefore, when we leave their neighborhood, the separation is of that complete kind which resembles temporary death. "No word comes from the dead," and no word comes from those silent friends. It is a melancholy thought in leaving a friend of this kind, when you shake hands at the station and still hear the sound of his voice, that in a few minutes he will be dead to you for months or years. The separation from a corresponding friend is shorn of half its sorrows. You know that he will write, and when he writes it requires little imagination to hear his voice again. To write, however, is not all. For correspondence to reach its highest value, both friends must have the natural gift of friendly letter-writing, which may be defined as the power of talking on paper in such a manner as to represent their own minds with perfect fidelity in their friendly aspect. This power is not common. A man may be a charming companion, full of humor and gayety, a well of knowledge, an excellent talker, yet his correspondence may not reveal the possession of these gifts. Some men are so constituted that as soon as they take a pen their faculties freeze. I remember a case of the same congelation in another art. A certain painter had exuberant humor and mimicry, with a marked talent for strong effects in talk; in short, he had the gifts of an actor, and, as Pius VII. called Napoleon I., he was both _commediante_ and _tragediante_. Any one who knew him, and did not know his paintings, would have supposed at once that a man so gifted must have painted the most animated works; but it so happened (from some cause in the deepest mysteries of his nature) that whenever he took up a brush or a pencil his humor, his tragic power, and his love of telling effects all suddenly left him, and he was as timid, slow, sober, and generally ineffectual in his painting as he was full of fire and energy in talk. So it is in writing. That which ought to be the pouring forth of a man's nature often liberates only a part of his nature, and perhaps that part which has least to do with friendship. Your friend delights you by his ease and affectionate charm of manner, by the happiness of his expressions, by his wit, by the extent of his information, all these being qualities that social intercourse brings out in him as colors are revealed by light. The same man, in dull solitude at his desk, may write a letter from which every one of these qualities may be totally absent, and instead of them he may offer you a piece of perfunctory duty-writing which, as you see quite plainly, he only wanted to get done with, and in which you do not find a trace of your friend's real character. Such correspondence as that is worth having only so far as it informs you of your friend's existence and of his health.