We hear to-day of love that aims at reason. Love forbid that I should say love knows not reason—but love and God forbid that it should aim at reason! Leave us that unwisdom at least: we are so wise to-day.
This ardent, gentle girl must suffer, and will suffer long—but will not die. She will live and she will grow. Shall she then look back with scorn upon that earlier self? . . . We talk much now of "re-incarnation," and always by our talk we seem to mean the coming-back to earth of a spirit which at some time has left it. But are there not re-incarnations of the still embodied spirit—is not re-incarnation, like eternity, with us here and now, as we "in this body" live and suffer and despair, and lift our hearts again to hope and faith? How many of us—grown, not changed—can pityingly look back at ourselves in some such dying moment as this poem shows us; for death it is to that "ourself." Hearts do not break, but hearts do die—that heart, that self: we pass into a Hades.
"Well, this cold clay clod
Was man's heart:
Crumble it, and what comes next?
Is it God?"
Or is it new heart, new self, new life? We come forth enfranchised from our Hades. The evil days, the cruel days—we call them back (a little, it may be, ashamed of our escape!) and still the blest remoteness will endure: it was wonderful how it could suffer, the poor heart. . . . Surely this is re-incarnation; surely no returning spirit witnesses more clearly to a transition-state? We have been dead; but this "us" who comes back to the world we knew is still the same—the heart will answer as it once could answer, the spirit thrill as once it thrilled. Only—this is the proof—both heart and spirit are further on; both have, as it were, gone past the earlier summons and the earlier sense of love; and so, evoking such an hour as this, when we could dream of "dying for his sake, white and pink," we smile in tender, not in scornful, pity—knowing now that "way undreamed" of our girl's dream, and knowing that that way is not to die, but live and grow, since love that changes "in a year" is not the love to die, or live, for.
FOOTNOTES:
[224:1] The descriptive phrase above might really, at a pinch, be applied to Annabella Milbanke.
[236:1] Note the fierceness achieved by the shortening and the alliteration in this line.