have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage
land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the
wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance
have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill-fitted
to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness,
I have every where sought, and have found only repulse and
disappointment.

_Thou_ demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction towards
all we conceive, or fear, or hope, beyond ourselves, when we find
within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek
to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience
within ourselves. If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine,
we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within
another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate
to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once, and
mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not
reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood:--this
is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only
man with man, but with every thing which exists. We are born into the
world, and there is something within us, which, from the instant that
we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness. It is probably
in correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from
the bosom of its mother; this propensity develops itself with the
development of our nature. We dimly see within our intellectual
nature, a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of
all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing
excellent and lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging
to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being,
but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is