I laughed.

“Lady, you are like all women who talk politics, however capable they may be of acting them.  You immediately beg the question.  We are speaking of patriotism, not of partisanship.”

“You it was who forsook the subject.  You know nothing about it; you confess that it is with you merely a blind instinct; you cannot tell me even what patriotism is.”

“Stay!” I replied.  “All love is instinct in the germ.  Can you define the yearnings that the mother feels toward her child, the tie that binds son to father?  Then you can define the sentiment that attaches me to the land from whose breast I have drawn life.  The love of country is more invisible, more imponderable, more inappreciable than the electricity that fills the air and flows with perpetual variation from pole to pole of the earth.  It is as deep, as unsearchable, as ineffable as the power which sways me to you.  It is the sublimation of other affection.  A portion of you has always gone out into the material spot where you have been, a portion of that has entered you, your past life is entwined with river and shore.  You become the country, and the country becomes a part of God.  Those who love their country, love the vast abstraction, can almost afford not to love God.  She is a beneficence, she is a shield, something for which to do and die, something for worship, ideal, grand; and though the sky is their only roof, the earth their only bed, affluent are they who have a land!  Passion rooted deeply as the foundations of the hills:  a man may adore one woman, but in adoring his land the aggregation of all men’s love for all other women overwhelms him and accentuates to a fuller emotion.  It is unselfish, impersonal, sheer sentiment clarified at its white heat from all interest and deceit, the noblest joy, the noblest sorrow.  Bold should they be, and pure as the priests who bore the ark, that dare to call themselves patriots.  And those, Lenore, who live to see their country’s hopeless ruin, plunge into a sadness at heart that no other loss can equal, no remaining blessing mitigate,—­neither the devotion of a wife nor the perfection of a child.  You have seen exiles from a lost land?  Pride is dead in them, hope is dead, ambition is dead, joy is dead.  Tell me, would you choose me to suffer the personal loss of love and you, a loss I could hide in my aching soul, or to bear those black marks of gall and melancholy which forever overshadow them in widest grief and gloom?”

She had sunk upon a seat, and was looking up at me with a pained unwavering glance, as if in my words she foresaw my fate.

“You are too intense!” she cried.  “Your tones, your eyes, your gestures, make it an individual thing with you.”

“And so it is!” I exclaimed.  “I cannot sleep in peace, nor walk upon the ways, while these Austrian bayonets take my sunshine, these threatening approaching French banners hide the fair light of heaven!”