And, now that I come to it, I feel hesitant. But this will not do.
In my whole narrative, there is, I am sure, but one single allusion, and that most brief—namely, Amor ordinem nescit—to my own heart-tragedy; and, as that allusion, even, is involved in obscurity, I will in this place and incontinently make it clear, and I do it by writing this:
I would rather have, though it were but for one single hour, Drorathusa as My Only than have for a lifetime any other woman I have ever known.
You will, I have no doubt, smile when you read this; you may think Eros has put me into a state very similar to the one in which the poor wight found himself of whom Burton wrote:
"He wisheth himself a saddle for her to sit on, a posy for her to smell to, and it would not grieve him to be hanged if he might be strangled in her garters."
Well, that busy little imp Venus's son (and he's as busy in that other world as he is in this) enjoys getting men and women into just such states of mind and heart. He moved even the rather cold-hearted Plato—I mean the great philosopher, not one of the poets so named, the philosopher who banished poets and Love himself from his Republic—the little imp moved even him to write:
"Thou gazest on the stars, my Life! Ah! gladly would I be
Yon starry skies, with thousand eyes, that I might gaze on thee!"
And I would rather have this heart-tragedy mine—have loved and lost Drorathusa—than never to have seen my lady.
"The heart has its reasons," says Pascal, "that reason can not understand."