draughts of sweetness and liquid light
and love unfathomable. And in the interval of speech half false,
the truth of what was all true welled up from the clear depths and
overflowed the falseness, till it grew falser and more fleeting
still--as a thing lying deep in a bright water casts up a distorted
image on refracted rays.

Glance and kiss, when two love, are as body and soul, supremely human
and transcendently divine. The look alone, when the lips cannot meet,
is but the disembodied spirit, beautiful even in its sorrow, sad,
despairing, saying "ever," and yet sighing "never," tasting and knowing
all the bitterness of both. The kiss without the glance? The body
without the soul? The mortal thing without the undying thought? Draw
down the thick veil and hide the sight, lest devils sicken at it, and
lest man should loathe himself for what man can be.

Truth or untruth, their love was real, hers as much as his. She
remembered only what her heart had been without it. What her goal might
be, now that it had come, she guessed even then, but she would not ask.
Was there never a martyr in old times, more human than the rest, who
turned back, for love perhaps, if not for fear, and said that for love's
sake life still was sweet, and brought a milk-white dove to Aphrodite's
altar, or dropped a rose before Demeter's feet? There must have been,
for man is man, and woman, woman. And if in the next month, or even the
next year, or after many years, that youth or maid took heart to bear a
Christian's death, was there then no forgiveness, no sign of holy
cross upon the sandstone in the deep labyrinth of graves, no crown, no
sainthood, and no reverent memory of his name or hers among those of men
and women worthier, perhaps, but not more suffering?

No one can kill Self. No one can be altogether another, save in the
passing passion of a moment's acting. I--in that syllable lies the whole
history of each human life; in that history lives the individuality; in
the clear and true conception of that individuality dwells such joint
foreknowledge of the future as we can have, such vague solution as to
us is possible of that vast equation in which all quantities are unknown
save that alone, that I which we know as we can know nothing else.

"Bury it!" she said. "Bury that parting--the thing, the word, and the
thought--bury it with all others of its kind, with change, and old age,
and stealing indifference, and growing coldness, and all th