ssetti says in his poem, eyes, hands, voice, lips, can meet so
strangely seldom in the happiest marriage; only in the invisible home of
the heart can the most fortunate husband and wife be always together:

Your heart is never away,
But ever with mine, forever,
Forever without endeavour,
Tomorrow, love, as today;
Two blent hearts never astray,
Two souls no power may sever,
Together, O my love, forever!

When I said that the absent were ghosts, I don't think you quite liked
the saying. It gave you a little shiver. It seemed rather grimly
fantastic. But do you not begin to see what I meant? Begin to see the
comfort in the thought? begin to see the inner connection between
Christmas and the ghost-story? Yes, the real lesson of Christmas is the
ever presence of the absent through love; the ghostly, that is to say
the spiritual, nature of all human intercourse. Our realities can exist
only in and through our imaginations, and the most important part of our
lives is lived in a dream with dream-faces, the faces of the absent and
the dead--who, in the consolation of this thought, are alike brought
near.

I have a friend who is dead--but I say to myself that he is in New
Zealand; for, if he were really in New Zealand, we should hardly seem
less distant, or be in more frequent communication. We should say that
we were both busy men, that the mails were infrequent, but that between
us there was no need of words, that we both "understood." That is what I
say now. It is just as appropriate. Perhaps he says it too. And--we
shall meet by the Christmas fire.

I have a friend who is alive. He is alive in England. We have not met
for twelve years. He never writes, and I never write. Perhaps we shall
never meet, never even write to each other, again. It is our way, the
way of many a friendship, none the less real for its silence--friendship
by faith, one might say, rather than by correspondence. My dead friend
is not more dumb, not more invisible. When these two friends meet me
by the Christmas fire, will they not both alike be ghosts--both, in a
sense, dead, but both, in a truer sense, alive?

It is so that, without our thinking of it, our simple human feelings one
for another at Christmas-time corroborate the mystical message which
it is the church's meaning to convey by this festival of "peace and
good-will to men"--the power of the Invisible Love;