Page:The dial, volume 3.djvu/539

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1843.]
Friendship.
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allow us to forget that the sun shone—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon. Yet no era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to the historian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light. If we could pierce the obscurity of those remote years we should find it light enough; only there is not our day.—Some creatures are made to see in the dark.—There has always been the same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses do not affect the general illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them. The eyes of the oldest fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of light prevailed then as now. Always the laws of light are the same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. The gods are partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone. There was but the eye and the sun from the first. The ages have not added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.

T.

FRIENDSHIP.

FROM CHAUCER'S "ROMAUNT OF THE ROSE."

Love of friendship also there is
Which maketh no man done amis,
Of will knitté betwixt two,
That woll not breake for wele ne wo,
Which long is likely to contune,
Whan will and goods been in commune.
Grounded by God's ordinaunce,
Hoolé without discordaunce,
With hem holding commauncé
Of all her good in charité,
That there be none exceptioun,
Through chaunging of ententioun,
That each help other at her nede,