ight have for the whispered hopes of a child who is lost in tiny
material dreams. But I gathered that there was a region in which the
heart could be entirely absorbed in a deep and beautiful admiration
for some other soul, and rejoice whole-heartedly in its nobleness and
greatness; so that no question of gaining anything, or even of being
helped to anything, came in, any more than one who has long been pent in
shadow and gloom and illness, and comes out for the first time into
the sun, thinks of any benefits that he may receive from the caressing
sunlight; he merely knows that it is joy and happiness and life to be
there, and to feel the warm light comfort him and make him glad; and all
this I had no difficulty in understanding, for I knew the emotion that
they spoke of, though I called it by a different name. I saw that it
was love indeed, but love infinitely purified, and with all the sense of
possession that mingles with masculine love subtracted from it; and how
such a relation might grow and increase, until there arose a sort of
secret and vital union of spirit, more real indeed than time and space,
so that, even if this were divorced and sundered by absence, or the
clouded mind, or death itself, there could be no shadow of doubt as to
the permanence of the tie; and a glance passed between the two as they
spoke, which made me feel like one who hears an organ rolling, and
voices rising in sweet harmonies inside some building, locked and
barred, which he may not enter. I could not doubt that the music was
there, while I knew that for some dulness or belatedness I was myself
shut out; not, indeed, that I doubted of the truth of what was said, but
I was in the position of the old saint who said that he believed, and
prayed to One to help his unbelief. For I saw that though I projected
the lines of my own experience infinitely, adding loyalty to loyalty,
and admiration to admiration, it was all on a different plane. This
interfusion of personality, this vital union of soul, I could not doubt
it! but it made me feel my own essential isolation still more deeply,
as when the streaming sunlight strikes warmth and glow out of the fire,
revealing crumbling ashes where a moment before had been a heart of
flame.

"Ah te meae si partem animae rapit
Maturior vis, quid moror altera?"--

"Ah, if the violence of fate snatch thee from me, thou half of my soul,
how can I, the other half, still linger here?" So wrote th