Thepassion rebuilds the world for the youth. Every bird on the boughs of the treesings now to his
heart and soul. The trees of the forest, the waving grass, andthe peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost fears to trust themwith the secret which they seem to invite. Beholdthere in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights;he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; heaccosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover,and the lily in his veins; and he talks with the brook that wets his foot. Itexpands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle, and gives the coward heart. Intothe most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy theworld, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. The lover sees noresemblance except to summer evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and thesong of birds. Theancients called
beauty the flowering of virtue. The god or hero of the sculptoris always represented in a transition _from_ that which is representable to thesenses, _to_ that which is not. The same remark holds of painting. And ofpoetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when itastonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable. Therefore,the Deity sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself ofbeautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and fair;and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her, and findsthe highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of thisperson, because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is withinthe beauty, and the
cause of the beauty. And, beholding in many
souls thetraits of the divine beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divinefrom the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to thehighest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on thisladder of created souls. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest,on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house, and yard, andpassengers, on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics, andgeography, and history. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing forharmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizinginstinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lowerrelations is impossible. The work of vegetation begins first in theirritability of the bark and leaf-buds. The soul is wholly embodied, and thebody is wholly ensouled. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love,in comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with theremembered image of the other. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving aperfect beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in thebehaviour of the other. They
appear and reappear, and continue to attract; butthe regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the substance. Meantime, aslife wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of all possiblepositions of the parties, to employ all the resources of each, and acquainteach with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and endof this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other. Allthat is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought intothe texture of man, of woman. Theworld rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabit thistemple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. Thoughslowly and with pain, the
objects of the affections change, as the objects ofthought do. The
soul may be trusted to the end.
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