The many dig and delve in your nature with fruitless toil to find the
spring of living water: he only raises his wand, and, obedient to the
hidden power, it bends at once to your secret. Your friendship, though
independent of language, gives to it life and light. The mystic spirit
stirs even in commonplaces, and the merest question is an endearment.
You are quiet because your heart is over-full. You talk because it is
pleasant, not because you have anything to say. You weary of terms that
are already love-laden, and you go out into the highways and hedges, and
gather up the rough, wild, wilful words, heavy with the hatreds of men,
and fill them to the brim with honey-dew. All things great and small,
grand or humble, you press into your service, force them to do soldier's
duty, and your banner over them is love.

With such a friendship, presence alone is happiness; nor is absence
wholly void,--for memories, and hopes, and pleasing fancies, sparkle
through the hours, and you know the sunshine will come back.

For such friendship one is grateful. No matter that it comes unsought,
and comes not for the seeking. You do not discuss the reasonableness of
your gratitude. You only know that your whole being bows with humility
and utter thankfulness to him who thus crowns you monarch of all
realms.

And the kingdom is everlasting. A weak love dies weakly with the
occasion that gave it birth; but such friendship is born of the
gods, and immortal. Clouds and darkness may sweep around it, but
within the cloud the glory lives undimmed. Death has no power over it.
Time can not diminish, nor even dishonor annul it. Its direction may
have been earthly, but itself is divine. You go back into your solitudes:
all is silent as aforetime, but you can not forget that a Voice once