And all this was transfused by a
kind of tender pity, without any touch of complacency or
superiority, such as a mother might have for the whispered hopes of
a child who is lost in tiny material dreams. But I gathered that
there was a region in which the heart could be entirely absorbed in
a deep and beautiful admiration for some other soul, and rejoice
whole-heartedly in its nobleness and greatness; so that no
question of gaining anything, or even of being helped to anything,
came in, any more than one who has long been pent in shadow and
gloom and illness, and comes out for the first time into the sun,
thinks of any benefits that he may receive from the caressing
sunlight; he merely knows that it is joy and happiness and life to
be there, and to feel the warm light comfort him and make him glad;
and all this I had no difficulty in understanding, for I knew the
emotion that they spoke of, though I called it by a different name.
I saw that it was love indeed, but love infinitely purified, and
with all the sense of possession that mingles with masculine love
subtracted from it; and how such a relation might grow and
increase, until there arose a sort of secret and vital union of
spirit, more real indeed than time and space, so that, even if this
were divorced and sundered by absence, or the clouded mind, or
death itself, there could be no shadow of doubt as to the
permanence of the tie; and a glance passed between the two as they
spoke, which made me feel like one who hears an organ rolling, and
voices rising in sweet harmonies inside some building, locked and
barred, which he may not enter.
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