nsolations, but a noble and enduring passion is
not all of this world, and to cure its sting we must look to something
beyond this world's quackeries. Other griefs can find sympathy and
expression, and become absorbed little by little in the variety of
love's issues. But love, as it is, and should be understood--not the
faint ghost that arrays itself in stolen robes, and says, "I am love,"
but love the strong and the immortal, the passkey to the happy skies,
the angel cipher we read, but cannot understand--such love as this,
and there is none other true, can find no full solace here, not even
in its earthly satisfaction.

For still it beats against its mortal bars and rends the heart that
holds it; still strives like a meteor flaming to its central star, or
a new loosed spirit seeking the presence of its God, to pass hence
with that kindred soul to the inner heaven whence it came, there to be
wholly mingled with its other life and clothed with a divine identity:
--there to satisfy the aspirations that now vaguely throb within their
fleshly walls, with the splendour and the peace and the full measure
of the eternal joys it knows await its coming.

And is it not a first-fruit of this knowledge, that the thoughts of
those who are plunged into the fires of a pure devotion fly upwards as
surely as the sparks? Nothing but the dross, the grosser earthly part
is purged away by their ever-chastening sorrow, which is, in truth, a
discipline for finer souls. For did there ever yet live the man or
woman who, loving truly, has suffered, and the fires burnt out, has
not risen Phoenix-like from their ashes, purer and better, and holding
in the heart a bright, undying hope? Never; for these have walked
bare-footed upon the holy ground, it is the flames from the Altar that
have purged them and left their own light within! And surely this
holds also good of those who have loved and lost, of those who have
been scorned or betrayed; of the suffering army that cry aloud of the
empty bitterness of life and dare not hope beyond. They do not
understand that having once loved truly it is not possible that they
should altogether lose: that there is to their pain and the dry-rot of
their hopes, as to everything else in Nature, an end object. Shall the
soul be immortal, and its best essence but a thing of air? Shall the
one thought by day and the one dream by night, the ethereal star which
guides us across life's mirage, and which will still shin