above the acquiescence of use, they never know
the cloying of fruition or suffer the barbarian conquest of
indifference. Their soul is unaffected by material circumstance or
misfortune, and illuminates their lives as often as in the silent hour
of meditation they concentrate their thoughts upon its grace. The cup of
earthly love, even the noblest, is often dipped in Pyriphlegethon, and
the draught it offers scathes the palate until its finest sensibility is
for ever dulled. Those who have quaffed this liquid fire can no longer
understand his mood who leaves the roses and the wine to toil through
deserts in search of limpid water. They think him madly ungrateful for
God's good gifts, a fool abandoning joy proved and present for a shadow
far and incomprehensible. But they who have not denied themselves are no
longer fit judges of him who has renounced. They cannot know that by
this renunciation the senses are thrice refined, and receive as a vital
influence the stellar beam which falls chill and ineffectual upon a
grosser frame. They cannot believe that this love from the infinite
distance wields as mighty a force over renunciant lives as the near
flame of passion over their own. But, for all their denial, it lives and
puissantly reigns. It reigns in very truth predominant, this ideal love
to which space exists not and propinquity is nothing; and it will have
none for its subjects but those who by bereavement or aspiration or
intense purity are inly prepared for its dominion.

Happy therefore are the shy if in the midst of their tribulation they
are guided to the gateway of so bright a kingdom. It may well be that we
must first be led thither by some dear-remembered and virgin form once
almost ours through earthly love, but now joined to us only by an
imperishable and mystic union. Our sight may at first need the embodied
beauty to give it the finer powers by which the revelation of the ideal
grows familiar to us, but is at last attainable without mortal
intervention by an immediate flight of the soul. Until that late day of
enlightenment we must still be set upon the celestial path by a touch
of human tenderness; a pure yet sensuous yearning must be ours when we
are first girded to the ascent. If there are beings which attain the
fulness of the ideal love without the first inspiration of a fair
earthly form I know nothing in creation to which they may be likened,
nor had I ever part in so rare an enfranchisement. The visi