on that now
entrances my soul first arose from a living, breathing form radiant with
earthly brightness and instinct with every charm which brings men
fawning to the feet of women. The sensuous frenzy which lovers sing was
also mine, the tremor of the heart, the vibration of the very life; the
deep seventh wave of passion rioted through me also. But from the first
amazement of the shaken being it was not given me to pass through
satisfaction into tranquillity; I was held long in a whirl of trouble;
in the anguish of denial I learned initiation into the mystery which is
eternal and supreme.

It is good for some of earth's children that passion should be stayed
before it makes ashes of the fancy; for if it does but touch for a
moment only to be withdrawn for ever, it does not destroy, but by its
meteoric passage kindles the imagination with the glow of an
incorruptible flame. It is with them long enough to brand upon memory
the image which, though never renewed before their bodily eyes, by its
very severance from perception puts on an immortality of virginal grace.
Love is understanding, said the poet of Heaven and Hell, and love
ennobled through renunciant years shall at the last encompass the world.
The sensuous glow that first quickened the heart of youth is transmuted
into a purer fire akin to that which moves the spheres.

To know this truth is their compensation who are swiftly withdrawn from
the warm radiance of earthly love. They are stricken, but before passion
blinds them are rapt into a high solitude, whence, if they truly love,
an infinite prospect is unrolled before them. They know desire; but as
their passion was hopeless in this world, their steps were mercifully
set upon a new path, whereby the bodily semblance of the beloved became
the symbol of spiritual comeliness, alluring the beholder into the
peace of a serene and unworldly mood. A thin and rarefied ideal, you
say, a mirage which no wayfarer can approach: experience rejects these
subtleties, and to these creations of a dream human affection was never
given. True, to hearts established and content in happy unions, to minds
preoccupied with the near cares and pleasures of a home, our distant
visions may appear frail structures wrought in mist by homeless fancy.
But for the exiled heart they are not such, but verities of abiding
inspiration. For the ideal love did not die with Plato, but came again
in mediaeval Italy, and who shall say that even our ma