It may safely be affirmed that generous minds, when they have once known each other, never can be alienated as long as both retain the characteristics which brought them into union. No distance of place or lapse of time can lessen the friendship of those who are thoroughly persuaded of each other’s worth. There are even some broken attachments in friendship, as well as in love, which nothing can destroy, and it sometimes happens that we are not conscious of their strength till after the disruption. There are a few persons known to me in years long past, but with whom I lived in no particular intimacy then, and have held no correspondence since, whom I could not now meet without an emotion of pleasure deep enough to partake of pain, and who, I doubt not, entertain for me feelings of the same kind and degree—whose eyes sparkle when they hear, and glisten sometimes when they speak of me, and who think of me, as I do of them, with an affection that increases as we advance in years. This is because our moral and intellectual sympathies have strengthened, and because, though far asunder, we know that we are travelling the same road towards our resting-place in heaven. “There is such a pleasure as this,” says Cowper, “which would want explanation to some folks, being perhaps a mystery to those whose hearts are a mere muscle, and serve only for the purpose of an even circulation.”[119] And Professor Wilson has written these words of sweet consolation for the loss of friends: Friends are lost to us by removal—for then even the dearest are often utterly forgotten. But let something that once was theirs suddenly meet our eyes, and in a moment, returning from the region of the rising or the setting sun, the friend of our youth seems at our side, unchanged his voice and his smile; or dearer to our eyes than ever, because of some affecting change wrought on face and figure by climate and by years. Let it be but his name written with his own hand on the title-page of a book; or a few syllables on the margin of a favourite passage which long ago we may have read together, “when life itself was new,” and poetry overflowed the whole world; or a lock of _her_ hair in whose eyes we first knew the meaning of the word “depth.” And if death hath stretched out the absence into the dim arms of eternity, and removed the distance away into that bourne from which no traveller returns—the absence and the distance of her on whose forehead once hung the relic we adore—what heart may abide the beauty of the ghost that doth sometimes at midnight appear at our sleepless bed, and with pale uplifted arms waft over us at once a blessing and a farewell! It rarely happens that broken friendships can be repaired or renewed. Mrs. Richard Trench, in her Journal, relates this remarkable instance of a failure: