nd.' And such love, I
suppose you will admit, does exist, however rarely?"

"Yes, I suppose so."

"Well, then, in the case of such a love, it is the object as it really
is, not as it has been falsely fashioned by the imagination, that is
directly apprehended as good. And you cannot fairly say that its Good
is merely the ideal of the lover transferred to the person of the
loved."

"But," objected Leslie, "though that may be so, yet still the Good,
that Is the person, does inhere in an alien stuff--the body."

"But," I replied,"_is_ the body alien? Is it not rather an expression
of the person? as essential, somehow or other, as the soul?"

"Certainly!" cried Ellis. "Give me the flesh, the flesh!

"'Not with my soul, Love!--bid no soul like mine
Lap thee around nor leave the poor sense room!
Take sense too--let me love entire and whole--
Not with my soul.'"

"I don't agree with the sentiment of that," said Leslie, "and anyhow,
I don't see how it bears on the question. For the point of the poem
is rather to emphasize than to deny the opposition between body and
soul."

"Yes," replied Ellis, "but also to suggest what you idealists call the
transcending of it."

"Do you mean that in the marriage relation, for example ..."

"Yes, I mean that in that act the flesh, so to speak, is annihilated
at the very moment of its assertion, and what you get is a feeling of
total union with the person, body and soul at once, or rather, neither
one nor the other, but simply that which is in and through both."

"I should have thought," objected Leslie, "it was rather a case of the
soul being merged in the body."

"That depends," replied Ellis.

"Yes," I said, "it depends on many things! But what I was thinking
of was that, quite apart from that experience, and in the moments
of sober observation, one does feel, does one not, a ^correspondence
between body and soul, as though the one were the expression of the
other?"

"I don't know," objected Audubon. "What I feel is much more often a
discrepancy."

"But still," I urged, "even when there appears to be a discrepancy
to begin with, don't you think that in the course of years the spirit
does tend to stamp its own likeness on the flesh, and especially on
the features of the face?"

"'For soul is form,'" quoted Leslie, "'and doth the body make.'"

"Yes," I said, "and that verse, I believe, is not merely a beautiful
fancy of the poet's, but rather as the Greeks