Yet here the lichen, creeping, loving, grows, Loneness doth kiss her sister Quiet's brow; Capes stretch away The linnet twitters, nor my footstep heeds. While bells from distant towers are dying round. St. Michael's Mount! who gazes from this height, On Nature in a trance of full delight Nature whose glories ne'er shall dim or cease Will feel an inward fire unfelt before The glow of admiration, and will muse Ay, he will think, our souls to exalt and please, God hath indulged choice dreams of beauty here, *The Lizard Point. The chapel on the summit of the Mount contains a fine organ, and here, at one of the angles on the tower, is the famous St. Michael's chair, the old legend attached to the latter being, that whichever of a newly-married couple first sits in this chair, he or she will maintain the mastery over the other for life. Lady Catherine Gordon, wife of Perkin Warbeck, the pretender, was held prisoner for some time at St. Michael's Mount. Her Majesty Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort visited the Mount in the autumn of 1846. A brass plate, the shape of the Queen's foot, has been inserted in one of the stones of the small pier where she landed. The visit of the Prince and Princess of Wales took place in July, 1865. ABOUT "PROGRESS BY ANTAGONISM" IN FRIENDSHIP AND LOVE. A CHAPTER ON ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. BY FRANCIS Jacox. THE elder Humboldt, in one of those Letters to a lady-friend of which at least two translations have found a welcome in our land, referring to and accounting for her relaxing intimacy with a former "inseparable, makes the remark: "It must have been difficult for friendship to connect you two; for it ever demands unity of character in respect to the main points, and it is almost vain for persons so obviously different as you describe your friend and yourself to have been, to become, or at least to remain, very much attached."* On the face of it, this absolute judgment might seem open to contradiction by a thousand well-known examples, seemingly to the contrary; but a great deal depends upon what is really meant by unity of character; and something at least on anomalies and idiosyncrasies in individual character itself. We find Schleiermacher once and again, in correspondence with one of his lady friends, touching on the paradoxical intimacy he cherished, while living at Stolpe, with the younger Schlegel. "As to my not loving Friedrich Schlegel, do not allow Jette to persuade you that this is so. That she should believe it, is but natural. She knows that Friedrich's character and mine are utterly heterogeneous, and she does not think it possible that any one can love a nature quite unlike his own. . . She knows that he is wanting in taste and feeling for much that I appreciate very highly, and she believes, therefore, that he is wanting in heart altogether, and that it is his intellect only that has attracted me, though I do not see this myself. But I am quite clear about my own feelings in this case. For his intellect alone I love no man," &c. Again, some months later, to the same, and about the same: "Jette, I know, raises objections on account of the great dissimilarity in our dispositions," and after enumerating a number of Schlegel's defects, "but these," he continues, "are only outward appearances, which are, indeed, very different from the outward expressions of my character; but it does not follow that the inward divergence between us is proportionately great. I admit, however, that the latter also is considerable; but great similarity of character is by no means necessary for friendship." One is so often weary of one's self, remarks Madame de Staël, that a resemblance of that self would never tempt affection, which requires a harmony of sentiment, but a contrast of character; many sympathies, but not unvaried congeniality.§ Relations are very apt to hate each other just because they are too much alike, according to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes,-it being so frightful, * Letters to a Lady, by the Baron Wilhelm von Humboldt, Dec. 1, 1825. Schleiermacher's Letters, No. clx., To Eleanore G―, June 8, 1802. Ibid., No. clxxiii., Sept. 10, 1802. Corinne, l. xvi. ch. i. he considers, to be in an atmosphere of family idiosyncrasies-to see all the hereditary peculiarities intensified by concentration, so that every fault of our own finds itself multiplied by reflections, like our images in a saloon lined with mirrors. And that pleasantest of American physicians, philosophers, and poets, all in one, characteristically and quasiprofessionally adds: "Nature knows what she is about. The centrifugal principle which grows out of the antipathy of like to like is only the repetition in character of the arrangement we see expressed materially in certain seed capsules, which burst and throw the seed to all points of the compass." Á house, he explains, is a large pod with a human germ or two in each of its cells or chambers, which opens "by dehiscence of the front door by-and-by," and projects* one of its germs one way, and another another, all to secure their emancipation from household identities, and afford them scope in opposite directions for the elective affinities of attraction by antagonism. The author of a clever essay on Women's Friendships, finds at once a reason for the confessed fact that women are not good friends with women in their want of diversity of character-upon which very diversity it is that the very strongest friendships are built. The best friends, he goes on to say, are not mere reproductions of one another; they are rather each other's complement. They are united, he argues, not by an accidental identity of tastes, or powers, or pursuits, but by the assimilation, through the affections, of intellectual and moral differences. It is not so much, says the essayist, that the character of either is changed, as that the characters of both are enlarged; our friends are added to, and become a part of ourselves, and we in turn are added to, and become a part of our friends. "An absolute resemblance is fatal to such a union; it leaves no room for the process of mutual adaptation. To bind people together, there must be different though corresponding angles in their characters- -recesses in which the salient points of each may find shelter, projections which may fit into and fill up the recesses. Without these they will be like pebbles in a wall, cemented by the force of interest, habit, or circumstance, but having no coherence of their own."+ One of Dr. Johnson's stately and sonorous Ramblers is devoted to an epistolary exemplification of connubial felicity—(the Doctor himself might have penned these polysyllables)-in one paragraph of which the complacent husband thus pictures his relation to his placens uxor. Though our characters, beheld at a distance, exhibit this general resemblance, yet a nearer inspection discovers such a dissimilitude of our habitudes and sentiments, as leaves each some peculiar advantage, and affords that concordia discors, that suitable disagreement which is always necessary to intellectual harmony." There may, he observes, be a total diversity of ideas which admits no participation of the same delight, and there may likewise be such a conformity of notions, as leaves neither anything to add to the decisions of the other. "With such contrariety there can be no peace, with such similarity there can be no pleasure. Our reasonings *See "Elsie Venner," ch. xi. † "It is just this variety in which women are deficient. In all other respects they are of the stuff that friends are made of, and many of the qualifications for friendship they possess in a far higher degree than men." -Saturday Review, xviii. 176. [the pattern penman's and his wife's], though often formed upon different views, terminate generally in the same conclusion. Our thoughts, like rivulets issuing from distant springs, are each impregnated in its course with various mixtures, and tinged by infusions unknown to the other, yet at last easily unite into one stream, and purify themselves by the gentle effervescence of contrary qualities."* Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, discusses at large the question of diversities in taste and in feeling, on the part of a pair of friends. We can much more easily, he remarks, overlook in our friend the want of correspondence in taste as to a picture or a poem, or in opinion as to a system of philosophy, than the want of such correspondence in feeling as to a misfortune that has befallen us, or an injury that has been done to us. "Though you despise that picture, or that poem, or even that system of philosophy, which I admire, there is little danger of our quarrelling upon that account. Neither of us can reasonably be much interested about them. They ought all of them to be matters of great indifference to us both; so that though our opinions may be opposite, our affections may still be very nearly the same." We often find Horace Walpole urging a reflection to this effect upon his reverend friend, Mr. Cole: "You and I differ radically in our principles, and yet in forty years they have never cast a gloom over our friendship." Again, a month later: "I was sorry you said we had any variance. We have differed in sentiments, but not in friendship. Two men, however unlike in principles, may be perfect friends, when both are sincere in their opinions as we are."§ And once again, twelve months after: "I should be truly sorry if I did lose a scruple of your friendship. You have ever been as candid to me as Mr. Baker|| was to his antagonists, and our friendship is another proof that men of the most opposite principles can agree in everything else, and not quarrel about them." According to La Bruyère, social pleasure between friend and friend is fostered by the co-existence of similarity of taste in matters moral, and of some discrepancy of opinion in matters scientific; and he gives the reason why. "Le plaisir de la société entre les amis se cultive par une ressemblance de goût sur ce qui regarde les mœurs, et par quelque différence d'opinions sur les sciences: par là, ou l'on s'affermit dans ses sentiments, ou l'on s'exerce et l'on s'instruit par la dispute."** Swift was capital friends with Sir Arthur Acheson, to and about whom many of the Dean's sprightliest verses were written-especially note-worthy among them being the Grand Question Debated; whether Hamilton Bacon should be turned into a Barrack or Malt-House. But in a summary of rhymes with reasons for the Dean's not building on Drapier's Hill, occurs this objection to becoming the knight's next neighbour: *The Rambler, No. clxvii., Oct. 22, 1751. Adam Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, part i., sect. i. Same to same, Oct. 19, 1777. A propos of a Life of that gentleman, just finished by Horace, and forwarded by him for the inspection of his clerical correspondent. Walpole to Cole, Oct. 26, 1778. ** Les Caractères de La Bruyère, ch. v. For the amount of discord compatible with intimacy is a question of degree as well as kind; and Swift's humorous exaggeration, if taken literally, would go far to show cause why intimacy between such a pair should be impracticable. Oderunt hilarem tristes, tristemque jocosi; says Horace. It is likeness which makes the true love-knot of friendship, says Owen Feltham; for, as he argues, when we find another of our own disposition, what is it but the same soul in a divided body? "We are then mutually transposed into each other; and nature, which makes us love ourselves, makes us for the same reason love those who are like us." With a difference, however; which psychologists like to study and account for. It is remarked by Mrs. Schimmelpenninck, that he who selects his friend for possessing a reduplication of his own qualities, or of his own temperament, increases indeed the force of those qualities and temperaments in volume and in power, but does not add to his original resources by the introduction of any new element; nor does he obtain the help necessary to obviate the evil or supply the defects of his own organisation: whereas he who chooses his friend, not indeed it may be on phrenological calculation, but by instinct of the heart and mind, and finds in him powers antagonistic to his own, will experimentally learn that such a friendship is affluent in resource, and efficacious in checks to evil.§ A great philosophical poet has a stanza to the purpose: True friends though diversely inclined; But heart with heart and mind with mind, May even by contraries be joined In reference to Miss Yonge's medieval story, "The Dove in the Eagle's Nest," it has been remarked that such a character as Christina, whose most prominent attributes are gentleness and refinement, may at first sight appear little adapted to exercise the influence she is there re * Swift's Poems: The Dean's Reasons for Not Building at Drapier's Hill. Autobiography of M. A. Schimmelpenninck, vol. i. p. 257. |