I think I would rather have had Mozart for a friend than to love and be loved by the greatest prima donna who ever warbled in high C. Friendship is better than love. Friendship means calm, sweet sleep, clear brain and a strong hold on sanity. Love I am told is only friendship, plus something else. But that something else is a great disturber of the peace, not to say digestion. It sometimes racks the brain until the world reels. Love is such a tax on the emotions that this way madness lies. Friendship never yet led to suicide. * * * * * Toledo: Yes, just at the age when Mozart wrote and played his "Requiem," getting ready to die, I was going to school and incidentally falling in love. I was thirty-four and shaved clean because there were gray hairs coming in my beard. Love has its advantages, of course, and the benefits of passionate love consist in scarifying one's sensibilities until they are raw, thus making one able to sympathize with those who suffer. Love sounds the feelings with a leaden plummet that sinks to the very depths of one's soul. This once done the emotions can return with ease, and so this is why no singer can sing, or painter paint, or sculptor model, or writer write, until love or calamity, often the same thing, has sounded the depths of his soul. Love makes us wise because it makes room inside the soul for thoughts and feelings to germinate; but passionate love as a lasting mood would be hell. Henry Finck says that is why Nature has fixed a two-year limit on romantic or passionate love. "War is hell," said General Sherman. "All is fair in Love and War," says the old proverb. Love and War are one, say I. Love is mad, raging unrest and a vain, hot, reaching out for nobody knows what. Of course the kind which I am talking about is the Grand Passion, not the sort of sentiment that one entertains towards his grandmother. "But it is good to fall in love, just as it is well to have the measles," to quote Schopenhauer. Still, there is this difference: one only has the measles once, but the man who has loved is never immune, and no amount of pledges or resolves can ere avail. Just here seems a good place to express a regret that the English language is such a crude affair that we use the same word to express a man's regard for roast-beef, his dog, child, wife and Deity. There are those who speedily cry, "Hold!" when one attempts to improve on the language, but I now give notice that on the first rainy day I am going to create some distinctions and differentiate for posterity along the line just mentioned. * * * * *