Few men have the temper or the
sentiment requisite for the support of intimate relations under
such conditions. But his friendships occupied a very large place in
Tocqueville's life. In them he found happiness and repose. To one of his
friends he writes in 1844, "The remembrance of you is the more precious
to me because it calms in me all those troubles of the soul that
politics engender." And thus in the most trying passages of his life,
and especially in the discouragement of his later years, the thought
of his friends seems to have been constantly with him, and his
correspondence with them became almost a necessity for his spirit.
His letters, or rather that portion of them which M. de Beaumont has
published, and which must some day be succeeded by a fuller collection,
have thus a double character: they contain the judgments of a wide and
profound thinker on the subjects which interested him, while they show
him in the most amiable and attractive light as a generous and constant
friend. They are not to be compared in wit or elaborate finish with the
brilliant letters of Courier; they have not the striking originality and
terse vigor of those of De Maistre, but they have the grace of simple
and pure feeling, and the worth of clear, manly, high-toned thought.
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