It was a charming fancy of the Pythagoreans to exchange names when they met that so they might partake of the virtues each admired in the other. And knowing the power of names they used only such as were musical and pleasing. The compliment thus bestowed upon the sentiment of friendship is most deserved, and suggestive of the magic of its influence at every age, throughout every period of our existence; our life, properly speaking, opening with the birth of fancy and the affections, and maintaining its freshness only as we are under their sway. A friendship formed in childhood, in youth,--by happy accident at any stage of rising manhood,--becomes the genius that rules the rest of life. What aspirations it awakens! what prospects! To what advantages, adventures, sacrifices, successes, does it not lead its votaries! What if these early unions are sometimes less tempered with discretion than those formed later, if they maintain their freshness and open out sure prospects of an endless future? He surely has no future who is without friends to share it with him, and is wasting an existence meant to give him that assurance. With this sentiment there comes every felicity into the breasts of those who partake of it. How large the dividend of delight! how diffusive! We are the richer for every outlay. We dip our pitchers in these fountains to come away overspilling with satisfaction. And had we a thousand friends, every spring within us would gush forth at the touch of these wands of tenderness, and the days pass as uncounted moments in their company. "O friend, the bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, Through thee the rose is red; All things through thee take nobler form, And look beyond the earth, And is the millround of our fate A sunpath in thy worth: Me, too, thy nobleness has taught To master my despair; The fountains of my hidden life, Are through thy friendship fair." How handsome our friends are! Say they were not moulded at the celestial potteries, we paint them fair behind the plain exterior they wear to indifferent eyes, and as they appear in our gallery of enamels. For who has not seen the plainest features light with a beauty the eyes had not conceived at the rise of a tender sentiment? a lively thought, the recollection of a noble deed, effacing every trace of ancestral meanness; the friend we love all there without blemish or spot, the image we clasp to our breast and cannot forget. Spectral and cold, indeed, were life surveyed from the senses alone, not from the soul, wanting the enthusiasm that persons inspire, the faith which exalts us above ourselves, giving us friends to love, and a God to adore. We enter heaven through the gates of friendship. 'Tis by some supreme fellowship that we complete ourselves, and are united to our kind.