of her friends. Many other friendships she had, which are commemorated in the pages of her published “Memoirs,” and which, indeed, produced the book. Moreover, she had half a dozen friendships with women for every one she maintained with men, and yet made it a matter of conscience to keep all these intimacies apart from one another. She writes once to Emerson (July 5, 1840): “Do not think, because persons are intimate with me, that they know this or any of my other friends’ secrets: I know how to keep relations.”[1] What was her ideal of such a tie may be seen from this passage, written to one of those nearest to her in sympathy, and dissenting both from his and from Emerson’s definitions of friendship: —
“The more I think of it, the more deeply do I feel the imperfection of your view of friendship, which is the same Waldo E. takes in that letter on Charles’s death. It is very noble, but not enough for our manifold nature. Our friends should be our incentives to Right, but not only our guiding, but our prophetic stars. To love by right is much, to love by faith is more; both are the entire love, without which heart, mind, and soul cannot be alike satisfied. We love and ought to love one another not merely for the absolute worth of each, but on account of a mutual fitness of temporary character. We are not merely one another’s priests or gods, but ministering angels, exercising in the part the same function as the Great Soul in the whole, of seeing the perfect through the imperfect, nay, making it come
- ↑ MS.
