But the passion of friendship for one of one's own sex burns with a calm clear flame. A thousand little subtleties of observation, that would mean nothing were we alone, take to themselves a significant and symbolic value and lead us down pleasant and flower-strewn vistas of airy fancy. In the absence of our friend the colour of his imagination falls like a magical light upon the saddest and dullest scenes; while with him at our side, all the little jerks and jars and jolts and ironical tricks of the hour and the occasion lose their brutish emphasis and sink into humorous perspective. The sense of having some one for whom one's weakest and least effective moments are of interest and for whom one's weariness and unreason are only an additional bond, makes what were otherwise intolerable in our life easy and light to bear. And what a delicious sense, in the midst of the open or hidden hostilities of our struggle against the world, to feel one has some one near at hand with whom, crouched in any "corner of the hubbub," we may "make game of _that_" which makes as much of us! Love, in the sexual sense, fails us in the bitterest crisis of our days because love, or the person loved, is the chief cause of the misery. Scourged and lacerated by Aphrodite it is of little avail to flee to Eros. But friendship--of the noble, rare, _absolute_ kind such as existed between Montaigne and his sweet Etienne--is the only antidote, the only healing ointment, the only anodyne, which can make it possible for us to endure without complete disintegration "the pangs of despised love" and love's bitter and withering reaction. Love too--in the ordinary sense--implies jealousy, exclusiveness, insatiable exactions; whereas friendship, sure of its inviolable roots in spiritual equality, is ready to look generously and sympathetically upon every wandering obsession or passing madness in the friend of its choice. With the exception of the love of a parent for a child this is the only human love which is outward-looking and centrifugal in its gaze; and even in the case of the love of a mother there is often something possessive and indrawing. How beautifully, how finally, Montaigne, in his description of this high passion, sweeps aside at one stroke all that selfish emphasis upon "advantage" of which Bacon makes so much, and all that idealistic anxiety to retain one's "separate identity" in which Emerson indulges! "I love him because he is he and he loves me because I am I." This is worthy to be compared with the beautiful and terrible "I _am_ Heathcliff" of the heroine in the Brontë novel. Emerson speaks as though, having sounded the depths of one's friend's soul, one moved off, with a wave of the hand, upon one's lonely quest, having none but God as one's eternal companion. This translunar preference for the "Over-soul" over every human feeling is not Montaigne's notion of the passion of friendship. He is more earth-bound in his proclivities.