The most extreme suffering, if it is only surrounded, without separating us, would seem to me nothing but a charming antithesis to the sublime frivolity of our marriage.  Why should we not take the harshest whim of chance for an excellent jest and a most frolicsome caprice, since we, like our love, are immortal?  I can no longer say my love and your love; they are both alike in their perfect mutuality.  Marriage is the everlasting unity and alliance of our spirits, not only for what we call this world and that world, but for the one, true, indivisible, nameless, endless world of our entire being, so long as we live.  Therefore, if it seemed the proper time, I would drain with you a cup of poison, just as gladly and just as easily as that last glass of champagne we drank together, when I said:  “And so let us drink out the rest of our lives.”  With these words I hurriedly quaffed the wine, before its noble spirit ceased to sparkle.  And so I say again, let us live and love.  I know you would not wish to survive me; you would rather follow your dying husband into his coffin.  Gladly and lovingly would you descend into the burning abyss, even as the women of India do, impelled by a mad law, the cruel, constraining purpose of which desecrates and destroys the most delicate sanctities of the will.

On the other side, perhaps, longing will be more completely realized.  I often wonder over it; every thought, and whatever else is fashioned within us, seems to be complete in itself, as single and indivisible as a person.  One thing crowds out another, and that which just now was near and present soon sinks back into obscurity.  And then again come moments of sudden and universal clarity, when several such spirits of the inner world completely fuse together into a wonderful wedlock, and many a forgotten bit of our ego shines forth in a new light and even illuminates the darkness of the future with its bright lustre.  As it is in a small way, so is it also, I think, in a large way.  That which we call a life is for the complete, inner, immortal man only a single idea, an indivisible feeling.  And for him there come, too, moments of the profoundest and fullest consciousness, when all lives fall together and mingle and separate in a different way.  The time is coming when we two shall behold in one spirit that we are blossoms of one plant, or petals of one flower.  We shall then know with a smile that what we now call merely hope was really memory.

Do you know how the first seed of this idea germinated in my soul before you and took root in yours?  Thus does the religion of love weave our love ever and ever more closely and firmly together, just as a child, like an echo, doubles the happiness of its gentle parents.