This is so difficult to describe, because every one professes to know
it and to respect it, and insincere eloquence and insincere enthusiasm
have poured themselves out over it in riotous streams. So that one
scruples to employ any word wherewith to indicate the true wonder,
because all words have been polluted and defiled through a horrible
misuse.
The true wonder is so great that the man of original spirit who has
found it would, if he had the power, not hesitate for a moment to
destroy all domestic happiness and domestic peace among the great human
herd, as long as these rest only on a conventional imitation, a
miserable substitute, of the true glory. I have lived in what to all
the world seemed a happy union. I have endured the terrible anguish of
a violent rupture of firmly-knit bonds of attachment and affection -
but how insignificant is all this, how sorry this apparent happiness,
how slight the anguish compared to the mighty and transcendent things
that were gained - the perfect tenderness, the real intimacy of true
conjugal love, the complete melting into one of two cells in the great
body of humanity.
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