for them chaotic life suffices. So too, many never,
save for some rare moment of illumination, desire or feel love. Its
happy abandonment, its careless self-giving, these things are mere
foolishness to them. But much has been said and sung of faith and love
alike, and in their confused greed these things also they desire and
parody. So they act worship and make a fine fuss of their devotions.
And also they must have a few half-furtive, half-flaunting fallen
love-triumphs prowling the secret backstreets of their lives, they know
not why.

(In setting this down be it remembered I am doing my best to tell what
is in me because I am trying to put my whole view of life before the
reader without any vital omissions. These are difficult matters to
explain because they have no clear outlines; one lets in a hard light
suddenly upon things that have lurked in warm intimate shadows, dim
inner things engendering motives. I am not only telling quasi-secret
things but exploring them for myself. They are none the less real and
important because they are elusive.)

True love I think is not simply felt but known. Just as Salvation as
I conceive it demands a fine intelligence and mental activity, so love
calls to brain and body alike and all one's powers. There is always
elaborate thinking and dreaming in love. Love will stir imaginations
that have never stirred before.

Love may be, and is for the most part, one-sided. It is the going out
from oneself that is love, and not the accident of its return. It is the
expedition whether it fail or succeed.

But an expedition starves that comes to no port. Love always seeks
mutuality and grows by the sense of responses, or we should love
beautiful inanimate things more passionately than we do. Failing a full
return, it makes the most of an inadequate return. Failing a sustained
return it welcomes a temporary coincidence. Failing a return it finds
support in accepted sacrifices. But it seeks a full return, and the
fulness of life has come only to those who, loving, have met the lover.

I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus writing about Love.
But the substance in which one works here is emotion that evades
definition, poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than prosaic
statements. Body and the most sublimated ecstasy pass into one another,
exchange themselves and elude every net of words we cast.

I have put out two ideas of unification and self-devotion, extremes upon