Excerpt from The Book of Friendship Shakespeare describes the way in which the essence of fleeting beauty is preserved. "For never-resting time leads summer on To hideous winter, and confounds him there: Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone, Beauty o'ersnowed and bareness everywhere: Then were not summer's distillation left A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass, Beauty's effect with beauty were bereft, Now it nor no remembrance what it was, But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet Leese but their show, their substance still lives sweet." A Book of Friendship is an attempt to collect some of these "flowers distilled" from the world's literature. As the generations pass, friends are separated. But theirs are expressions of feeling that are imperishable. The "substance still lives sweet." It is pleasant not only to know what wise men have thought about friendship, but how friendly souls have actually felt. There must be a vast variety in the incidents of friendships and a unity in its essential nature. No abstract or philosophical description can satisfy us in regard to an intimate personal experience which we all have felt. I can imagine a warm-hearted friend reading Emerson's Essay on Friendship, and wondering what it is all about. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.