Now, my most worthy Raphael, let me look round. The height has been
ascended, the mist is dissipated; I stand in the midst of immensity, as
in the middle of a glowing landscape. A purer ray of sunlight has
clarified all my thoughts. Love is the noblest phenomenon in the world
of souls, the all-powerful magnet in the spiritual sphere, the source of
devotion and of the sublimest virtue. Yet love is only the reflection of
this single original power, an attraction of the excellent, based upon
an instantaneous permutation of individuality, an interchange of being.
When I hate, I take something from myself; when I love, I become richer
by what I love. To pardon is to recover a property that has been lost.
Misanthropy is a protracted suicide: egotism is the supremest poverty of
a created being.
When Raphael tore himself from my embrace my soul was rent in twain, and
I weep over the loss of my nobler half. On that holy evening—you must
remember it—when our souls first communed together in ardent sympathy,
all your great emotions became my own, and I only entered into my
unvarying right of property over your excellence; I was prouder to love
you than to be loved by you, for my own affection had changed me into
Raphael.
Was it not this almighty instinct
That forced our hearts to meet
In the eternal bond of love?
Raphael! enraptured, resting on your arm,
I venture, joyful, the march towards perfection,
That leadeth to the spiritual sun.
Happy! happy! I have found thee,
Have secured thee ’midst millions,
And of all this multitude thou art mine!
Let the wild chaos return;
Let it cast adrift the atoms!
Forever our hearts fly to meet each other.
Must I not draw reflections of my ecstasy
From thy radiant, ardent eyes?
In thee alone do I wonder at myself.
The earth in brighter tints appears,
Heaven itself shines in more glowing light,
Seen through the soul and action of my friend.
Sorrow drops the load of tears;
Soothed, it rests from passion’s storms,
Nursed upon the breast of love.
Nay, delight grows torment, and seeks
My Raphael, basking in thy soul,
Sweetest sepulchre! impatiently.
If I alone stood in the great All of things,
Dreamed I of souls in the very rocks,
And, embracing, I would have kissed them.
I would have sighed my complaints into the air;
The chasms would have answered me.
O fool! sweet sympathy was every joy to me.
Love does not exist between monotonous souls, giving out the same tone;
it is found between harmonious souls. With pleasure I find again my
feelings in the mirror of yours, but with more ardent longing I devour
the higher emotions that are wanting in me. Friendship and love are led
by one common rule. The gentle Desdemona loves Othello for the dangers
through which he has passed; the manly Othello loves her for the tears
that she shed hearing of his troubles.
There are moments in life when we are impelled to press to our heart
every flower, every remote star, each worm, and the sublimest spirit we
can think of. We are impelled to embrace them, and all nature, in the
arms of our affection, as things most loved. You understand me, Raphael.
A man who has advanced so far as to read off all the beauty, greatness,
and excellence in the great and small of nature, and to find the great
unity for this manifold variety, has advanced much nearer to the
Divinity. The great creation flows into his personality. If each man
loved all men, each individual would possess the whole world.
I fear that the philosophy of our time contradicts this doctrine. Many
of our thinking brains have undertaken to drive out by mockery this
heavenly instinct from the human soul, to efface the effigy of Deity in
the soul, and to dissolve this energy, this noble enthusiasm, in the
cold, killing breath of a pusillanimous indifference. Under the slavish
influence of their own unworthiness they have entered into terms with
self-interest, the dangerous foe of benevolence; they have done this to
explain a phenomenon which was too godlike for their narrow hearts. They
have spun their comfortless doctrine out of a miserable egotism, and
they have made their own limits the measure of the Creator; degenerate
slaves decrying freedom amidst the rattle of their own chains. Swift,
who exaggerated the follies of men till he covered the whole race with
infamy, and wrote at length his own name on the gallows which he had
erected for it—even Swift could not inflict such deadly wounds on human
nature as these dangerous thinkers, who, laying great claim to
penetration, adorn their system with all the specious appearance of art,
and strengthen it with all the arguments of self-interest.
Why should the whole species suffer for the shortcomings of a few
members?
I admit freely that I believe in the existence of a disinterested love.
I am lost if I do not exist; I give up the Deity, immortality, and
virtue. I have no remaining proof of these hopes if I cease to believe
in love. A spirit that loves itself alone is an atom giving out a spark
in the immeasurable waste of space.