and enjoys less keenly. But the heart is the border-land between
body and soul. The heart can love and the body can love, but the body
can only love itself; the heart is the wellspring of the lore that goes
beyond self. Therefore your heart awoke.

"Shall I tell you of the first early stirrings of your love? Think you,
because I am gray and loveless, that I have never known youth and
gladness of heart? Ah, I know, better than you can think. It is not
sudden, really, the blossoming out of the tree of life. The small leaves
grow larger and stronger though still closely folded in the bud, until
the bright warmth of the spring makes them burst into bloom. The little
lark in the nest among the grass grows beneath the mother's wing and
idly moves, now and then, unconscious of the cloud-cleaving gift of
flight, until all at once, in the fair dawning, there wells up in his
tiny breast the mighty sense of power to rise.

"The human heart is like the budded folded leaves, and like the untaught
lark. The quiet sleep before the day of blooming is, while it lasts, a
state of happiness. But it is not comparable with the breathing joy of
the leaf that feels and sees the wonderful life around it, whispering
divine answers to the wooing breeze. The humble nest where it has first
seen light is for many days a happy home to the tender songster, soon
left behind, when the first wing-strokes waft the small body upwards to
the sky, and forgotten as the first glad trill and quaver of the
new-found voice roll out the prelude to the glorious life-long hymn of
praise. The heart of man--your heart, my dear friend--gave a great leap
from earth to sky, when first it felt the magic of the other life. The
grosser scales of material vision fell away from your inner sight on the
day when you met, and knew you had met, the woman you were to love.

"I found you again, a different man, a far happier man, though you would
hardly allow that. A sweet uncertainty of the future half-tinged your
joy with a shadow of sadness, which you had not known before: but love
sadness is only the shading and gentle pencilling in love's wondrous
picture, whereby the whole light of the painting is made clearer and
stronger. A new world opened out before you in endless vistas of untold
and undreamed bliss. You looked back at your former self, so careless
and sunny, so consciously happy in the strong sense of life and power,
and you wondered how you could have been even cont