"Has the longest prayer of man been answered to thee, stranger, and hast thou thy friend? Do thy wishes and nerves and days grow together with his, like the four cedars on Lebanon, which can bear nothing around them but eagles? Hast thou two hearts and four arms, and livest thou twice over, as if immortal, in the battling world? Or standest thou solitary and alone upon a frosty, dumb, slender, glacier-point, having no human being to whom thou canst show the Alps of creation, and with the heavens arching far above thee and abysses yawning below? When thy birthday comes, hast thou no being to shake thy hand, and look thee in the eye and say, We still cleave together faster than ever? "Stranger: if thou hast had no friend, hast thou deserved one? When spring kindled into life, and opened all her honey-cups, and her serene heaven, and all the hundred gates of her Paradise, hast thou, like me, bitterly looked up and begged of God a heart for thine? O when, at evening, the sun went down like a mountain, and his flames departed from the earth, and now only his red breath floated upward to the silvery stars, hast thou beheld the brotherly shadows of friendship which sank together on battle-fields, like stars of one constellation, stealing forth through the bloody clouds out of the old world, like giants; and didst thou think of _this_,--how imperishably they loved each other, and thou, like me, wast alone? And, solitary one, when night--that season at which the spirit of man, as in torrid climes, _toils_ and _travels_--reveals her cold suns above thee in a sparkling chain, and when, still, among all the distant forms of the ether there is no dear loved one, and immensity painfully draws thee up, and thou feelest, upon the cold earth, that thy heart beats against no breast but only thine own,--O beloved! weepest thou then, and most bitterly? "Charles, often have I reckoned up, on my birthday, the increasing years,--the feathers in the broad wing of time,--and thought upon the sounding flight of youth: then I stretched my hand far out after a friend, who should stick by me in the Charon's skiff wherein we are born, when the seasons of life's year glide by along the shore before me, with their flowers and leaves and fruits, and when, on the long stream, the human race shoots downward in its thousand cradles and coffins. "Ah, it is not the gay, variegated shore that flies by, but man and his stream: forever bloom the seasons in the gardens up and down along the shore; only _we_ sweep by once for all before the garden, and never return.