I had hoped that the voyage would produce some beneficial effect upon
Lilian; but no effect, good or bad, was perceptible, except, perhaps, a
deeper silence, a gentler calm. She loved to sit on the deck when the
nights were fair, and the stars mirrored on the deep. And once thus, as I
stood beside her, bending over the rail of the vessel, and gazing on the
long wake of light which the moon made amidst the darkness of an ocean to
which no shore could be seen, I said to myself, "Where is my track of
light through the measureless future? Would that I could believe as I did
when a child! Woe is me, that all the reasonings I take from my knowledge
should lead me away from the comfort which the peasant who mourns finds in
faith! Why should riddles so dark have been thrust upon me,--me, no fond
child of fancy; me, sober pupil of schools the severest? Yet what
marvel--the strangest my senses have witnessed or feigned in the fraud
they have palmed on me--is greater than that by which a simple affection,
that all men profess to have known, has changed the courses of life
prearranged by my hopes and confirmed by my judgment? How calmly before I
knew love I have anatomized its mechanism, as the tyro who dissects the
web-work of tissues and nerves in the dead! Lo! it lives, lives in me;
and, in living, escapes from my scalpel, and mocks all my knowledge. Can
love be reduced to the realm of the senses? No; what nun is more barred
by her grate from the realm of the senses than my bride by her solemn
affliction? Is love, then, the union of kindred, harmonious minds? No,
my beloved one sits by my side, and I guess not her thoughts, and my mind
is to her a sealed fountain. Yet I love her more--oh, ineffably
more!--for the doom which destroys the two causes philosophy assigns to
love--in the form, in the mind! How can I now, in my vain physiology, say
what is love, what is not? Is it love which must tell me that man has a
soul, and that in soul will be found the solution of problems never to be
solved in body or mind alone?"
My self-questionings halted here as Lilian's hand touched my shoulder.
She had risen from her seat, and had come to me.
"Are not the stars very far from earth?" she said.
"Very far."
"Are they seen for the first time to-night?"
"They were seen, I presume, as we see them, by the fathers of all human
races!"
"
"Yet close below us they shine reflected in the waters; and yet, see, wave
flows on wave before we can count it!"
"Lilian, by what sympathy do you read and answer my thought?"
Her reply was incoherent and meaningless. If a gleam of intelligence had
mysteriously lighted my heart to her view, it was gone. But drawing her
nearer towards me, my eye long followed wistfully the path of light,
dividing the darkness on either hand, till it closed in the sloping
horizon.