The heart is in each of us what those marks are upon the scattered
stones of a building in course of construction which indicate that they
are to be united one to another. The philosopher suffices for himself,
the stoics used to say; the heart is the negation of this haughty maxim.
From the heart proceeds love, that son of abundance and of poverty, to
speak with Plato, that needy one ever on the search for his lost
heritage. Love has wings, said again the wisdom of the Greeks, wings
which essay to carry him ever higher. Let us extricate the thought which
is involved in these graceful figures: Our desires have no limits, and
indefinite desires can be satisfied only by meeting with an infinite
Being who can be an inexhaustible source of happiness, an eternal object
of love. "Our heart is made for love," said Saint Augustine, the great
Christian disciple of Plato: "therefore it is unquiet till it finds
repose in God." From this unrest proceed all our miseries. Men do not
always succeed in contenting themselves with a petty prosaic happiness,
a dull and paltry well-being, and in stifling the while the grand
instincts of our nature. If then the heart lives, and fails of its due
object; if it does not meet with the supreme term of its repose, its
indefinite aspirations attach themselves to objects which cannot satisfy
them, and thence arise stupendous aberrations. With some, it is the
pursuit of sensual gratifications; they rush with a kind of fury into
the passions of their lower nature. With others it is the ardent pursuit
of riches, power, fame,--feelings which are always crying more: More!
and never: Enough. And the after-taste from the fruitless search after
happiness in the paths of ambition and vanity is not less bitter perhaps
than the after-taste from sensual enjoyments. Listen to the confession
of a man whose works, full as they are of beauties, are disfigured by so
many impure allusions, that the author appears to have indulged, more
than most others, in the giddy follies and culpable pleasures of life: