That was a sad day.  Father came home, agreed I had been very uncivil.  At night my mother put me to bed, and I prayed, but I could not sleep, and kept wondering what these strange people were, whom one must not love.

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Thou poor human heart!  So soon in the spring are thy leaves broken and the feathers torn from the wings!  When the spring-red of life opens the hidden calyx of the soul, it perfumes our whole being with love.  We learn to stand and to walk, to speak and to read, but no one teaches us love.  It is inherent in us like life, they say, and is the very deepest foundation of our existence.  As the heavenly bodies incline to and attract each other, and will always cling together by the everlasting law of gravitation, so heavenly souls incline to and attract each other, and will always cling together by the everlasting law of love.  A flower cannot blossom without sunshine, and man cannot live without love.  Would not the child’s heart break in despair when the first cold storm of the world sweeps over it, if the warm sunlight of love from the eyes of mother and father did not shine upon him like the soft reflection of divine light and love?  The ardent yearning, which then awakes in the child, is the purest and deepest love.  It is the love which embraces the whole world; which shines resplendent wherever the eyes of men beam upon it, which exults wherever it hears the human voice.  It is the old, immeasurable love, a deep well which no plummet has ever sounded; a fountain of perennial richness.  Whoever knows it also knows that in love there is no More and no Less; but that he who loves can only love with the whole heart, and with the whole soul; with all his strength and with all his will.

But, alas, how little remains of this love by the time we have finished one-half of our life-journey!  Soon the child learns that there are strangers, and ceases to be a child.  The spring of love becomes hidden and soon filled up.  Our eyes gleam no more, and heavy-hearted we pass one another in the bustling streets.  We scarcely greet each other, for we know how sharply it cuts the soul when a greeting remains unanswered, and how sad it is to be sundered from those whom we have once greeted, and whose hands we have clasped.  The wings of the soul lose their plumes; the leaves of the flower fast fall off and wither; and of this fountain of love there remain but a few drops.  We still call these few drops love, but it is no longer the clear, fresh, all-abounding child-love.  It is love with anxiety and trouble, a consuming flame, a burning passion; love which wastes itself like rain-drops upon the hot sand; love which is a longing, not a sacrifice; love which says “Wilt thou be mine,” not love which says, “I must be thine.”  It is a most selfish, vacillating love.  And this is the love which poets sing and in which young men and maidens believe; a fire which burns up and down, yet does not warm, and leaves nothing behind but smoke and ashes.  All of us at some period of life have believed that these rockets of sunbeams were everlasting love, but the brighter the glitter, the darker the night which follows.