What an ocean is life! and how our barks get separated in beating through it! One of the greatest comforts of the retirement to which I shall soon withdraw, will be its rejoining me to my earliest and best friends, and acquaintances.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot
And days o'lang syne?

For auld lang syne, my dear,

For auld lang syne,

We'll take a cup o' kindness yet,

For auld lang syne.

Old friends are the greatest blessings of one's latter years. Half a word conveys one's meaning. They have memory of the same events, and have the same mode of thinking.

But what binds us friend to friend,
But that soul with soul can blend?
Soul-like were those hours of yore;
Let us walk in soul once more.

When you have spent your boyhood and played your youthful pranks with a comrade, the sympathy between you and him has something sacred about it; his voice, his glance, stir certain chords in your heart that only vibrate under the memories he brings back.

Thomas
Jefferson

Robert
Burns

Horace Walpole

Ludwig
Uhland

Honoré de Balzac

Thomas

Jefferson

Oliver Wendell Holmes

Shakespeare

Ovid in "Amorum"

James

Russell

Lowell

"Under

the Willows"

I find friendship to be like wine, raw when new, ripened with age, the true old man's milk and restorative cordial.

Friend, whom thy fourscore winters leave more
dear

Than when life's roseate summer on thy cheek
Burned in the flush of manhood's manliest year,
Lonely, how lonely! is the snowy peak

Thy feet have reached, and mine have climbed
so near!

Close on thy footsteps, 'mid the landscape drear,
I stretch my hand thine answering grasp to seek,
Warm with the love no rippling rhymes can speak!

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey'd,
Such seems your beauty still.

All your life there was perfect agreement between you, and to the end your long and faithful friendship endured.

There muse I of old times, old hopes, old friends. Old friends! The writing of those words has borne

My fancy backward to the gracious past,

The generous past, when all was possible,
For all was then untried; the years between
Have taught some sweet, some bitter lessons,

none

Wiser than this,-to spend in all things else,
But of old friends to be most miserly.

That friendship which first came and which shall last endure.

A friend may be often found and lost, but an old friend can never be found, and nature has provided that he cannot be easily lost.

To grow old with you; when the days grow sere
To have you by me, making time appear

Our willing servant; at an age awry

Laughing and jesting as in times gone by;
Recalling youth, O friend ere youth was near,
Has left the sweeter each advancing year.
Still is earth green, and skies are ever clear
That listen to my happy heart's fond cry
To grow old with you!

And how old joys return and linger here
In the retelling, how quickly dries the tear

You smile upon, how quick the new griefs fly!
So, when fulfillment come, why, then shall I
Smile at my granted wish-how should I fear?—
To grow old with you.

I enjoy, in recollection, my ancient friendships, and suffer no new circumstances to mix alloy with them.

When round the bowl of vanished years
We talk with joyous seeming,

179

Samuel Johnson

Wallace Rice on "Growing Old Together"

Thomas
Jefferson

Thomas
Moore

With smiles that might as well be tears,

So faint, so sad their beaming;

While memory brings us back again
Each early tie that twined us,

Oh, sweet's the cup that circles then
To those we 've left behind us!

Friendship is the shadow of the evening, which strengthens with the setting sun of life.

La Fontaine

XVI

FRIENDS THAT ARE GONE