But, alack! as Miss Howe wrote to the immortal Clarissa, my paper is at an end, my crowquill worn to the stump. So I can only add as postscript to such of my dear friends as write the letters which my soul abhors, that I hope, beg, entreat they will at least write them to me often.
There is not unfrequently a spice of humiliation hidden in the rich cordial pleasure of a new friendship, and I think Emerson knew it. Without beating about the bush as he does, one might explain it, methinks, not merely as a vague sense of disloyalty towards the other friendships which are not new; but also as a shrewd suspicion (though we hide it from ourselves) that this one also will have to grow old in its turn. And we have not yet found out how to treat any of our possessions, including our own selves, in such a way that they shall, if anything, improve. Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one. Those ghastly paper toilettes of the ladies in "Looking Backward" are emblematic of our modes of proceeding. We are for ever dressing and undressing our souls, if not our bodies, in rags made out of rags.
Heaven forbid that I should ever blaspheme new friendships! They are among the most necessary as well as the most delightful things we get a chance of. They do not merely exhilarate, but actually renew and add to us, more even than change of climate and season. We are (luckily for every one) such imitative creatures that every person we like much, adds a new possible form, a new pattern, to our understanding and our feeling; making us, through the pleasantness of novelty, see and feel a little as that person does. And when, instead of _liking_ (which is the verb belonging rather to good acquaintance, accidental relationship as distinguished from real friendship), it is a case of _loving_ (in the sense in which we really love a place, a piece of music, or even, very often, an animal), there is something more important and excellent even than this. For every creature we do really love seems to reveal a whole side of life, by the absorbing of our attention into that creature's ways; nay, more, the fact that what we call _loving_ is in most cases a complete creation, at least a thorough interpretation of them by our fancy and our shaken-up, refreshed feelings.