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
composed: a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and
brightness: a soul within our own soul that describes a circle around
its proper Paradise, which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap.
To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should
resemble and correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; the
meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own;
an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle
and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and
unfold in secret, with a frame, whose nerves, like the chords of two
exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice,
vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and a combination of all these
in such proportion as the type within demands: this is the invisible
and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it
urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that,
without the possession of which, there is no rest or respite to the
heart over which it rules.
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