On Love

What is love? Ask him who lives, what is life? ask him who adores,
what is God?

I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even thine,
whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they
resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought
to appeal to something in common, and unburthen my inmost soul to
them, I have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant
and savage land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for
experience, the wider has appeared the interval between us, and
to a greater distance have the points of sympathy been withdrawn.
With a spirit ill fitted to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble
through its tenderness, I have everywhere sought sympathy and have
found only repulse and disappointment.

Thou demandest what is love? It is that powerful attraction towards
all that we conceive, or fear, or hope beyond ourselves, when we
find within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void,
and seek to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we
experience within ourselves. If we reason, we would be understood;
if we imagine, we would that the airy children of our brain were
born anew within another's; if we feel, we would that another's
nerves should vibrate to our own, that the beams of their eyes
should kindle at once and mix and melt into our own, that lips of
motionless ice should not reply to lips quivering and burning with
the heart's best blood. This is Love. This is the bond and the
sanction which connects not only man with man, but with everything
which exists. We are born into the world, and there is something
within us which, from the instant that we live, more and more
thirsts after its likeness. It is probably in correspondence with
this law that the infant drains milk from the bosom of its mother;
this propensity develops itself with the development of our nature.
We dimly see within our intellectual nature a miniature as it were
of our entire self, yet deprived of all that we condemn or despise,
the ideal prototype of everything excellent or lovely that we are
capable of conceiving as belonging to the nature of man. Not only
the portrait of our external being, but an assemblage of the minutest
particles of which our nature is composed;[Footnote: These words
are ineffectual and metaphorical. Most words are so--No help!] a
mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and brightness;
a soul within our soul that describes a circle around its proper
paradise, which pain, and sorrow, and evil dare not overleap. To
this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should
resemble or correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; the
meeting with an understanding capable of