judiciously applied?
No matter what may be said against the statement, England is
materialist,--possibly she does not know it herself. She lays claim to
religion and morality, from which, however, divine spirituality, the
catholic soul, is absent; and its fructifying grace cannot be replaced
by any counterfeit, however well presented it may be. England possesses
in the highest degree that science of existence which turns to account
every particle of materiality; the science that makes her women's
slippers the most exquisite slippers in the world, gives to their
linen ineffable fragrance, lines their drawers with cedar, serves tea
carefully drawn, at a certain hour, banishes dust, nails the carpets
to the floors in every corner of the house, brushes the cellar walls,
polishes the knocker of the front door, oils the springs of the
carriage,--in short, makes matter a nutritive and downy pulp, clean and
shining, in the midst of which the soul expires of enjoyment and the
frightful monotony of comfort in a life without contrasts, deprived of
spontaneity, and which, to sum all in one word, makes a machine of you.

Thus I suddenly came to know, in the bosom of this British luxury, a
woman who is perhaps unique among her sex; who caught me in the nets of
a love excited by my indifference, and to the warmth of which I opposed
a stern continence,--one of those loves possessed of overwhelming charm,
an electricity of their own, which lead us to the skies through the
ivory gates of slumber, or bear us thither on their powerful pinions.
A love monstrously ungrateful, which laughs at the bodies of those it
kills; love without memory, a cruel love, resembling the policy of the
English nation; a love to which, alas, most men yield. You understand
the problem? Man is composed of matter and spirit; animality comes to
its end in him, and the angel begins in him. There lies the struggle we
all pass through, between the future destiny of which we are conscious
and the influence of anterior instincts from which we are not wholly
detached,--carnal love and divine love. One man combines them, another
abstains altogether; some there are who seek the satisfaction of their
anterior appetites from the whole sex; others idealize their love in one
woman who is to them the universe; some float irresolutely between the
delights of matter and the joys of soul, others spiritualize the body,
requiring of it that which it cannot give.

If, thinking over