guest whose silence maddens and whose sweetness consoles,--whose filmy
radiance eclipses all beauty,--whose voiceless eloquence subdues all
sound,--ever beckoning, ever inspiring, patient, pleading, and
unchanging,--this is the Ideal which Plato called the dearer self,
because, when its craving sympathies find reflex and response in a
living form, its rapturous welcome ignores the old imperfect being, and
the union only is recognized as Self indeed, complete and undivided.
And that fulness of human love becomes a faint type and interpreter of
the Infinite, as through it we glide into grander harmonies and
enlarged relations with the Universe, urged on forever by insatiable
desires and far-reaching aspirations which testify our celestial
origin and intimate our immortal destiny.

"'Lo! arm in arm, through every upward grade,
From the rude Mongol to the starry Greek,
everywhere we seek
Union and bond, till in one sea sublime
Of love be merged all measure and all time!"

"I never disclosed in words my love to Blanche. Through the lucid
transparency of Presence, I believed that she knew all and
comprehended all, without the aid of those blundering symbols. We never
even spoke of the future; for all time, past and to come, seemed to
converge and centre and repose in that radiant present. In the
enchantment of my new life, I feared lest a breath should disturb the
spell, and send me back to darkness and solitude.

"Of course, this could not last forever. There came a time when I found
that my affairs would compel me to leave New Orleans for a year, or
perhaps a little longer. With the discovery my dream was broken. The