months and
years, what our hearts knew at once? Even love has become more or less
of a mental process. We reason about things instead of feeling them,
and yet when we come to our last analyses we don't _know_ anything; we
simply feel. When the scientist says, 'The amoeba moves out of the
shade into the sunlight because it wants the sunlight,' he bases his
postulate upon what he feels, and believes that the atom feels. This
is all that he knows. We do not seek warmth because we have calculated
its effects upon us, but because we feel cold. Oh, we have starved our
feelings to feed our brains, until the mind believes it is the
immortal part of us, instead of realizing that what we know, we are
merely re-discovering, while what we feel is our apperception of the
infinite. If we had the courage to be true to our feelings, instead of
our thoughts, I believe it would be a better, as it would certainly be
a truer, world."

"Do you really think more people are guided by thought than by
feeling?" she asked with a good deal of surprise.

"Perhaps not in one sense," he answered. "A great many people are
carried along by their impulses, their transitory emotions, which are
not, properly speaking, feelings at all. They make what some one calls
the 'fatal error of mistaking the eddy for the current.' But among
educated people it seems to me that we think too much, especially of
our own thoughts, and feel too little. All this year I have not said
that I loved you; I don't know that I have thought it, but I have felt
and lived it. Sometimes I have not been thoughtful--"

"You have always been too thoughtful," she interrupted.

"No, but when I have been inconsiderate it was because you were
myself, the best self that we overlook sometimes, but return to with
unfailing loyalty. You were not bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;
that is a very low and material view of what you have been and are to
me, heart of my heart and soul of my soul. I cannot think of a life
apart from you, for you are my life. Marriage is not a matter of a
license and a ceremony and Mendelssohn and gaping crowds and a tour.
We do not need any one to tell us that what God has joined cannot be
sundered by man. All this year has been a long wedding of every
thought and feeling and desire, until I have looked into your eyes to
see my own wish. We have thought and thought, but that way madness
lies. Now I feel that all the world we have lost, lives for us in
every