But
what this love is, he who thinks he knows least understands. Let foolish
maidens and vulgar youths simper and jest over it as they please, it is
one of the most potent mysteries of the living God. The man who can love
a woman and remain a lover of his wretched self, is fit only to be cast
out with the broken potsherds of the city, as one in whom the very salt
has lost its savour. With this love in his heart, a man puts on at least
the vision robes of the seer, if not the singing robes of the poet. Be
he the paltriest human animal that ever breathed, for the time, and in
his degree, he rises above himself. His nature so far clarifies itself,
that here and there a truth of the great world will penetrate, sorely
dimmed, through the fog-laden, self-shadowed atmosphere of his
microcosm. For the time, I repeat, he is not a lover only, but something
of a friend, with a reflex touch of his own far-off childhood. To the
youth of my history, in the light of his love--a light that passes
outward from the eyes of the lover--the world grows alive again, yea
radiant as an infinite face. He sees the flowers as he saw them in
boyhood, recovering from an illness of all the winter, only they have a
yet deeper glow, a yet fresher delight, a yet more unspeakable soul.
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