The Golden Link of Friendship Part 10

"Let all be forgotten between us-- All save the dear old friends.h.i.+p, and that shall grow older and dearer.

_Longfellow_

Lack of Friends

It is a mere and miserable solitude to want true friends, without which the world is but a wilderness.

_Bacon_

Ill-starred, indeed, is he who injures men: Is fortune adverse, he is friendless then.

_Saadi_

Those that want friends are cannibals of their own hearts.

Communicating a man's self to his friends redoubleth his joys and cutteth griefs in halves. A friend is another _himself_. If a man have not a friend, he may quit the world's stage!

_Bacon_

A favourite has no friend.

_Gray_

It is only the great-hearted who can be true friends; the mean and cowardly can never know what true friends.h.i.+p means.

_Charles Kingsley_

We walk alone in the world. Friends such as we desire are dreams and fables. But a sublime hope cheers ever the faithful heart, that elsewhere, in other regions of the universal power, souls are now acting, enduring, and daring, which can love us and which we can love.

_Emerson_

Loss of Friends.h.i.+p

Alas! they had been friends in youth; But whispering tongues can poison truth; And constancy lives in realms above; And life is th.o.r.n.y; and youth is vain; And to be wroth with one we love Doth work like madness in the brain.

_Coleridge_

Intimacies which increase vanity destroy friends.h.i.+p.

_William Ellery Channing_

Between friends, frequent reproofs make the friends.h.i.+p distant.

_Confucius_

Our friends.h.i.+ps hurry to short and poor conclusions, because we have made them a texture of wine and dreams, instead of the tough fibre of the human heart. The laws of friends.h.i.+p are great, austere, and eternal, of one web with the laws of nature and of morals.

_Emerson_

Each spoke words of high disdain And insult to his heart's best brother: They parted--ne'er to meet again!

But never either found another To free the hollow heart from paining-- They stood aloof, the scars remaining, Like cliffs which had been rent asunder; A dreary sea now flows between.

But neither heat, nor frost, nor thunder, Shall wholly do away, I ween, The marks of that which once hath been.

_Coleridge_

Loss of Friends

What greetings smile, what farewells wave, What loved ones enter and depart!

The good, the beautiful, the brave, The Heaven-lent treasures of the heart!

How conscious seems the frozen sod And beechen slope whereon they trod!

The oak-leaves rustle, and the dry gra.s.s bends Beneath the shadowy feet of lost or absent friends.

_Whittier_

O friend! O best of friends! Thy absence more Than the impending night darkens the landscape o'er!

_Longfellow_

What shall I do, my friend, When you are gone forever?

My heart its eager need will send Through the years to find you never, And how will it be with you, In the weary world I wonder, Will you love me with a love as true, When our paths be far asunder?

_Mary Clemmer_

A man dies as he looses his friends.

_Bacon_

We call that person who has lost his father, an orphan; and a widower, that man who has lost his wife.... And that man who has known the immense unhappiness of losing his friend, by what name do we call him?... Here every human language holds its peace in impotence.