were to stand over them with his fire and forge, and offer to melt them
down and run them together, and of two to make them one again, they
would both say that this was just what they desired!'

"I dare say you have read--unless your partiality for the soft Southern
tongues has chased away your Teutonic taste--that exquisite poem of
Schiller's, 'Das Geheimnitz der Reminiscenz,' the happiest possible
crystallization of the same theory. I recall a few lines from Bulwer's
fine translation:--

"'Why from its lord doth thus my soul depart?
Is it because its native home thou art?
Or were they brothers in the days of yore,
Twin-bound both souls, and in the links they bore
Sigh to be bound once more?

"'Were once our beings blent and intertwining,
And therefore still my heart for thine is pining?
Knew we the light of some extinguished sun,--
The joys remote of some bright realm undone,
Where once our souls were ONE?

"'Yes, it is so! And thou wert bound to me
In the long-vanished eld eternally!
In the dark troubled tablets which enroll
The past my Muse beheld this blessed scroll,--
'One with thy love, my soul'!"

"Now the Athenian dreamer builded better than he knew. That phantom
which perpetually attends and perpetually evades us,--the inevitable