It seemed like the essence
of human passion, the end that lovers desire, and discern faintly behind
and beyond the accidents of sense and contact, like the sounding of a
sweet chord, without satiety or fever of the sense.
I learnt many strange and beautiful secrets of the human heart in those
days: what the dreams of womanhood are--how wholly different from the
dreams of man, in which there is always a combative element. The soul of
Cynthia was like a silent cleft among the hills, which waits, in its own
still content, until the horn of the shepherd winds the notes of a chord
in the valley below; and then the cleft makes answer and returns an airy
echo, blending the notes into a harmony of dulcet utterance. And she
too, I doubt not, learnt something from my soul, which was eager and
inventive enough, but restless and fugitive of purpose. And then there
came a further joy to us. That which is fatherly and motherly in the
world below is not a thing that is lost in heaven; and just as the love
of man and woman can draw down and imprison a soul in a body of flesh,
so in heaven the dear intention of one soul to another brings about a
yearning, which grows day by day in intensity, for some further outlet
of love and care.
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