Between heart and heart, speech is the paltriest of channels.
What a thin—yet what an invisible and impenetrable—film separates those two worlds: the one, that of the visible, audible, and tangible, the world of chatter and laughter, of convention, often of make-believe; and the other, the world of deep and voiceless emotions, of the feelings which know not how to give themselves utterance, of affections which crave so much and are so impotent to say or to seek what they crave! It is like a layer of ice separating the hidden and soundless deeps from the aerial world of noise and motion.—What would not one heart give to break the icy crust and see and know what was really passing in another? —And how often we drown if we do break through!
The isolation of the individual human heart is complete. It is the most pathetic past in the universe, and it is that against which the individual human heart rebels most.
There must be some profound and cosmic problem underlying this fact which no philosophy—and no religion—can solve. That it is pathetic seems to prove it temporary, earthly, a matter of time and space; but, when will the individual human heart coalesce with the Heart of the Universe— which, perhaps, is the goal of all Life? For
It may be that these little terrestrial human individuals which we call men and women are after all only tiny and temporary centers of conscious activity in an ocean of infinite consciousness; as atoms are but tiny and temporary centers of energy in an ocean of infinite ether. Could we see the sum total of Supreme and Infinite Consciousness at a glance, perhaps individual men and women would dissolve into a mighty unity, could see and comprehend the whole of the luminiferous ether. Well, perhaps
Love is the only known means by which the individual heart can make any expansion whatsoever beyond its own bounds. Yet, alas! Nothing seems to break down the barriers of sense. The human heart beats its ineffectual wings in vain against the walls of its fleshly tabernacle. Will nothing unite the Boy and the Girl? Will nothing bring the Man and the Woman really together? Yet the Boy thinks that, were the Girl wholly his, he and she would be happy; and the Man thinks that, were the Woman and he to share every thought and every emotion, he and she would want naught else. Is the amalgamation impossible? Is the coalescence of thought and feeling outside the bounds of human possibility? What, then, impels mankind to crave it, to attempt it, to sacrifice so much for it?—There is a cosmic puzzle here with which nor philosophy nor psychology nor religion has yet attempted to grapple.
After all, pitiful as it may be, lamentable as it may be, it is true, and it must be said, that this human heart of ours goes through life hungry, very hungry and unappeased. For what it hungers, what it has missed, whereto it looks for sustenance, it itself does not know. Thus,
This feminine heart sighs without ceasing for because that other masculine heart upon which it staked all its all, and an all that meant so much, proved callous and indifferent;
That masculine heart ceases not to curse itself for resorting to such hasty and violent methods by which to obtain for itself an ephemeral and passing pleasure;
This feminine heart eats out its life with remorse for because it gave itself so unthinkingly when asked; though of a survey it thought that asking was a thing prompted by impulses as noble as they seemed divine; and