Take sense too—let me love entire and whole—
Not with my soul.'"
"I don't agree with the sentiment of that," said Leslie, "and anyhow, I don't see how it bears on the question. For the point of the poem is rather to emphasize than to deny the opposition between body and soul."
"Yes," replied Ellis, "but also to suggest what you idealists call the transcending of it."
"Do you mean that in the marriage relation, for example ..."
"Yes, I mean that in that act the flesh, so to speak, is annihilated at the very moment of its assertion, and what you get is a feeling of total union with the person, body and soul at once, or rather, neither one nor the other, but simply that which is in and through both."
"I should have thought," objected Leslie, "it was rather a case of the soul being merged in the body."
"That depends," replied Ellis.
"Yes," I said, "it depends on many things! But what I was thinking of was that, quite apart from that experience, and in the moments of sober observation, one does feel, does one not, a ^correspondence between body and soul, as though the one were the expression of the other?"
"I don't know," objected Audubon. "What I feel is much more often a discrepancy."