Suppose a wide and delightful landscape, and what the eye is to the light, and the light to the eye, that interchangeably is the lover to the beloved. "O best beloved! who lovest _me_ the best!" In strictest propriety of application might he thus address her, if only she with equal truth could echo the same sense in the same feeling. "Light of mine eye! by which alone I not only see all I see, but which makes up more than half the loveliness of the objects seen, yet, still, like the rising sun in the morning, like the moon at night, remainest thyself and for thyself, the dearest, fairest form of all the thousand forms that derive from thee all their visibility, and borrow from thy presence their chiefest beauty!"
[Sidenote: COTTLE'S "FREE VERSION OF THE PSALMS"]
Diamond + oxygen = charcoal. Even so on the fire-spark of his zeal did Cottle place the King-David diamonds, and caused to pass over them the oxygenous blast of his own inspiration, and lo! the diamond becomes a bit of charcoal.
"Ich finde alles eher auf der Erde, so gar Wahrheit und Freude, als Freundschaft."--JEAN PAUL.[F]
This for the motto--to examine and attest the fact, and then to explain the reason. First, then, there are the extraordinary qualifications demanded for true friendship, arising from the multitude of causes that make men delude themselves and attribute to friendship what is only a similarity of pursuit, or even a mere dislike of feeling oneself alone in anything. But, secondly, supposing the friendship to be as real as human nature ordinarily permits, yet how many causes are at constant war against it, whether in the shape of violent irruptions or unobserved yet constant wearings away by dyspathy, &c. Exemplify this in youth and then in manhood. First, there is the influence of wives, how frequently deadly to friendship, either by direct encroach, or, perhaps, intentional plans of alienation! Secondly, there is the effect of families, by otherwise occupying the heart; and, thirdly, the action of life in general, by the worldly-wise, chilling effects of prudential anxieties.
Corollary. These reflections, however, suggest an argument in favour of the existing indissolubility of marriage.
To be compelled to make it up, or consent to be miserable and disrespected, is indeed a coarse plaister for the wounds of love, but so it must be while the patients themselves are of coarse make and unhealthy humours.