remember that

Between the masculine heart and the feminine is a great gulf fixed. Nay,
rather

From youth to age, each human heart seems unwittingly to build about
itself a high and ever higher-growing wall, impenetrable, indelapidable,
not to be scaled by the look or speech or gesture.
Never can heart coalesce with heart. And yet

The absolute and intimate coalescence of heart with heart--is not this,
after all, the consummation that every lover seeks? To attempt that
consummation by mere speech, it is this that is of questionable import.
Since

Between heart and heart, speech is the paltriest of channels.

What a thin--yet what an invisible and impenetrable--film separates
those two worlds: the one, that of the visible, audible, and tangible,
the world of chatter and laughter, of convention, often of make-believe;
and the other, the world of deep and voiceless emotions, of the feelings
which know not how to give themselves utterance, of affections which
crave so much and are so impotent to say or to seek what they crave! It
is like a layer of ice separating the hidden and soundless deeps from the
aerial world of noise and motion.--What would not one heart give to
break the icy crust and see and know what was really passing in another?
--And how often we drown if we do break through!

The isolation of the individual human heart is complete. It is the most
pathetic past in the universe, and it is that against which the
individual human heart rebels most.

There must be some profound and cosmic problem underlying this fact which
no philosophy--and no religion--can solve. That it is pathetic seems
to prove it temporary, earthly, a matter of time and space; but, when
will the individual human heart coalesce with the Heart of the Universe--
which, perhaps, is the goal of all Life? For

It may be that these little terrestrial human individuals which we call
men and women are after all only tiny and temporary centers of conscious
activity in an ocean of infinite consciousness; as atoms are but tiny and
temporary centers of energy in an ocean of infinite ether. Could we see
the sum total of Supreme and Infinite Consciousness at a glance, perhaps
individual men and women would dissolve into a mighty unity, could see
and comprehend the whole of the luminiferous ether. Well, perhaps

Love is the only known means by which the individual heart can make any
expansion whatsoever beyond its own bounds. Yet, alas!
N