* * *

No heart, under repeated temperings, can remain forever keen.  And

As a little body sometimes has a very big pain; so an aching heart wonders that it can bear so much.  And

What takes place in the quiet deeps of a troubled heart, who shall know?

* * *

The way to the heart is not through the head: 

Between heart and heart, there are many channels.  But three are in universal use:  the eyes, the lips, and the finger-tips.  Now the greatest of these is the eyes.

* * *

The masculine heart will never wholly understand the feminine, nor the feminine the masculine. (O the pity o’ it!) And yet, after all,

The human heart is much more the same, whether it beats under a cuirass or under a corset.

Between the masculine heart and the feminine, perfect frankness is perhaps of questionable import.  But why?  It is difficult to say.  Perhaps because

The aspirations and desires of the human heart are infinite and unappeasable.  To attempt to formulate them is to frustrate them.  For

It is as impossible for any two human hearts, as it is impossible for any two material things, to occupy the same space.  Especially when we remember that

Between the masculine heart and the feminine is a great gulf fixed.  Nay, rather

From youth to age, each human heart seems unwittingly to build about itself a high and ever higher-growing wall, impenetrable, indelapidable, not to be scaled by the look or speech or gesture.  Never can heart coalesce with heart.  And yet

The absolute and intimate coalescence of heart with heart—­is not this, after all, the consummation that every lover seeks?  To attempt that consummation by mere speech, it is this that is of questionable import.  Since

Between heart and heart, speech is the paltriest of channels.

What a thin—­yet what an invisible and impenetrable—­film separates those two worlds:  the one, that of the visible, audible, and tangible, the world of chatter and laughter, of convention, often of make-believe; and the other, the world of deep and voiceless emotions, of the feelings which know not how to give themselves utterance, of affections which crave so much and are so impotent to say or to seek what they crave!  It is like a layer of ice separating the hidden and soundless deeps from the aerial world of noise and motion.—­What would not one heart give to break the icy crust and see and know what was really passing in another?  —­And how often we drown if we do break through!

The isolation of the individual human heart is complete.  It is the most pathetic past in the universe, and it is that against which the individual human heart rebels most.

There must be some profound and cosmic problem underlying this fact which no philosophy—­and no religion—­can solve.  That it is pathetic seems to prove it temporary, earthly, a matter of time and space; but, when will the individual human heart coalesce with the Heart of the Universe—­ which, perhaps, is the goal of all Life?  For