Tell me, oh dear love, where now is the face that once
showed me all the heaven I cared to know, the form that
made the rapture of my youth, the spell which filled my
breast with delicious pain, the lips whose touch so coy, so
rarely gained, was honey and myrrh and wine? Oh, say not
that she, too, is of the Shadow ! —

Nay, she is here at thy side and has never left thee, but is
in all things the same — look again ! Alas ! this is not the face
that charmed my youth, this is not the form that filled my
dreams — and her eyes were clear as the well-springs of Para-
dise. But oh, for pity of it, let not my poor love know that
her dear enrapturing self, with our precious dream in which
we drew down heaven to earth, is gone forever into the
Shadow. ..
We are shadows all, living ghosts, so slight of memory
and consciousness that we seem to die many deaths ere the
final one. This illusion we name life is intermittent — hardly
can we recall what happened day before yesterday. Even the
great events of life (as we phrase them) do but feebly stamp
our weak consciousness. By a fiction which everyone knows
to be false, we make a pretence of feeling much and deeply.
'Tis a handsome compliment to our common nature, but the
truth is we rarely feel — our substance is too thin and ghost-
like.
