verily 'is' in love. And now he 'knows' himself to be so, by the 'so'
being--he can even prove it to his own mind by his certainty, his
'intuition' of the essential difference, as actually as it is
uncommunicable, between it and its previous subjective counterfeits,
and anticipations. Even so it is with friends.--O it is melancholy to
think how the very forms and geniality of my affections, my belief of
obligation, consequent gratitude and anxious sense of duty were wasted
on the shadows of friendship. With few exceptions, I can almost say,
that till I came to H----, I never 'found' what FRIENDS were--and
doubtless, in more than one instance, I sacrificed substances who
loved me, for semblances who were well pleased that I should love
'them', but who never loved nor inwardly respected ought but
themselves. The distinction between 'the' friends and 'the' love is,
that the latter we discover by itself to 'be', alone itself--for it is
in its nature unique and exclusive. (See Improvvisatore in the
'Amulet' of 1826 or 7).

"But of the former we discover the genuineness by comparison and
experience--the reason is obvious--in the instances in which the
person imagined himself to 'be in love' with another (I use this
phrase 'be in love with' for the want of any other; for, in fact, from
the absence in our language of any appropriate exponent of the thing
meant), it is a delusion in toto. But, in the other instance, the one
half (i.e. the person's own feelings and sense of duty with acts
accordant) remains the same (ex. gr. S.T.C. could not feel more
deeply, nor from abatement of nervous life by age and sickness so
'ardently') he could not feel, think, and act with a 'more' entire
devotion, to I.G. or to H.G. than he did to W.W. and to R.S., yet the
latter were and remain most honourable to his judgment. Their
characters, as moral and intellectual beings, give a dignity to his