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While we float here, far from that tributary stream on whose
banks our Friends and kindred dwell, our thoughts, like the
stars, come out of their horizon still; for there circulates a
finer blood than Lavoisier has discovered the laws of, - the
blood, not of kindred merely, but of kindness, whose pulse still
beats at any distance and forever.
True kindness is a pure divine affinity,
Not founded upon human consanguinity.
It is a spirit, not a blood relation,
Superior to family and station.
After years of vain familiarity, some distant gesture or
unconscious behavior, which we remember, speaks to us with more
emphasis than the wisest or kindest words. We are sometimes made
aware of a kindness long passed, and realize that there have been
times when our Friends' thoughts of us were of so pure and lofty
a character that they passed over us like the winds of heaven
unnoticed; when they treated us not as what we were, but as what
we aspired to be. There has just reached us, it may be, the
nobleness of some such silent behavior, not to be forgotten, not
to be remembered, and we shudder to think how it fell on us cold,
though in some true but tardy hour we endeavor to wipe off these
scores.
In my experience, persons, when they are made the subject of
conversation, though with a Friend, are commonly the most prosaic
and trivial of facts.
