Is all the counsel that we two have shared, The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent, When we have chid the hasty-footed time For parting us, O! is all forgot? All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence? We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, Have with our needles ccreated both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides; voices, and minds Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, But yet an union in partition, Two lovely berries moulded on one stem: So with two seeming bodies, but one heart; Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, Due but to one and crowned with one crest. And will you rend our ancient love asunder, To join with men in scorning your poor friend?
Romantically warm and generous as the friendships of school-boys are, those of school-girls are much more so. They are more purposed and absorbing, more sedulously cultivated and consciously important. School-girls often have their distinctly defined and well-understood degrees of intimacy--their first, their second, their third, friend. Thus a thousand little dramas are daily played, full of delights and woes, of which outsiders, who have no key to them, never so much as dream. Probably no chapter of sentiment in modern fashionable life is so intense and rich as that which covers the experience of budding maidens at school. In their mental caresses, spiritual nuptials, their thoughts kiss each other, and more than all the blessedness the world will ever give them is foreshadowed. They have not yet reached the age for a public record or confession of their pangs and raptures; so these dramas are for the most part only guessed at. But keener agonies, more delicious passages, are nowhere else known than in the bosoms of innocent school-girls, in the lacerations or fruitions of their first consciously given affections. A startling illustration has come to the knowledge of the writer just as he is penning these words. Two girls, about sixteen years old, attending a private school together, in one of the chief cities of the United States, formed a strong attachment to each other, and were almost inseparable. The father of one of the girls, for some reason, had a dislike for the other, and forbade his daughter to associate with her. The two friends preferred death to separation. They took laudanum, and were found dead in each other's arms. What element of romance or tragedy ever known, is not every day experienced, all about us, under the thin disguise of commonplace?