Love — Iclea — Attraction.

IN this life of intimate communion, this solitude à deux, delightful as it was, there was something wanting. These conversations on the weighty problems of life and death, this interchange of ideas concerning the nature of man, these speculations regarding the origin and end of all things, these contemplations of the heavens, and the thoughts they awakened, satisfied for a time their minds, but not their hearts. After hours spent in conversation together, seated beside each other in the arbor of the garden overlooking the great city spread like a map before them, or in the solitude of the library, the philosopher, the scientist, had not the necessary strength of will to enable him to tear himself from the society of his beloved companion. Hand in hand they would sit beside each other in silence, held by a resistless power. On separating they would both experience a strange and painful sensation in the heart, an indefinable malaise, as if something there, necessary to their existence, had snapped, and both alike longed but for the hour of reunion. He loved her for her own sake, not for his, with an affection that was almost impersonal, in which there was as much esteem as love, and by unceasing struggles against the allurements of the senses, he had thus far been able to resist their power. But one day, as they were seated in silence near each other on the large sofa in the library — littered as usual with books and manuscripts — George, exhausted perhaps by the efforts he had so long been making to resist the power of a spell that was irresistible, allowed his head to sink imperceptibly on the shoulder of his companion, and — their lips met.

Ah, joys ineffable of requited love! Insatiable desire of the soul thirsting for happiness, transports without end of the soaring imagination, sweet harmony of hearts — to what ethereal heights do you raise those who abandon themselves to your supreme delights! Lost in the raptures of the region of enchantment to which their souls have taken flight, they forget the world they have left beneath them and all it contains. The earth, with its baseness and its misery, exists no longer for them. Light as air, they dwell in flames, like salamanders or phoenixes, and consumed perpetually in their own fires, perpetually rise from their ashes ever luminous, ever ardent, invulnerable, invincible.

The transports experienced by the lovers in this expansion of feeling so long repressed, plunged them into an ecstasy that made them, for a period, forget metaphysics and its problems. This period lasted six months. The sweetest but most imperious of sentiments had come to supply in their being the want which intellectual pleasures had not been able completely to satisfy. From the day of that kiss George Spero not only disappeared altogether from the world, but he even ceased to write. I myself completely lost sight of him, notwithstanding the long and sincere affection he had always shown me. Logicians might perhaps have deduced from this that, for the first time in his life, he was satisfied, and that he had found the solution of the great problem — the final end of existence. They lived in that egotism of lovers which, removing the rest of the world beyond their center of vision, diminished their defects and made them appear more amiable and beautiful.

Often they would walk along the borders of the Seine at sunset, silently contemplating the marvelous effects of light and shade that make the sky of Paris so beautiful at twilight, when the spires and dwellings of the city stand darkly outlined against the luminous background of the western sky.

Rosy and purple clouds, lighted up by the reflection of the sun’s last rays upon the water, gave the sky that strange charm peculiar to our Parisian sky, less gorgeous than that of Naples, bathed, as it is, in the light reflected from the Mediterranean on the West, but more beautiful than that of Venice illumined by the light from the East, which is pale.

Whether, drawn by the spell of the old City, they wandered along the river-bank, passing in turn Notre Dame and the old Chatelet projecting its black silhouette against the still luminous sky; or, as was oftener the case, attracted by the splendors of the sunset and of Nature, they passed along the quays beyond the ramparts of the vast city into the solitudes of Boulogne and Billancourt, shut in by the dark sides of Meudon and Saint Cloud, it was all the same; they forgot the noisy city they had left behind them, and walking with the same steps, the two forming one, they received at the same time the same impressions, thought the same thoughts, and, silent, spoke the same Ianguage. The river flowing at their feet, the noises of the day sunk into silence, Iclea loved to repeat to George the names of the stars as they appeared one by one in the sky.

There are often in Paris mild days in March and April, when the air is spring-like. The brilliant stars of Orion, the dazzling Sirius, the twins Castor and Pollux, sparkle in the spacious vault of heaven; the Pleiades sink toward the western horizon; but Arcturus, and Bo?tes, shepherd of the Celestial flock, arise, and a few hours later the shining Vega rises above the eastern horizon, to be soon followed by the Milky Way. Arcturus, with his rays of gold, was always the first star to be recognized by his piercing brightness and his position at the end of the tail of the Great Bear. At times the crescent moon glittered in the west, and the young spectator admired, like Ruth beside Boaz, “this golden scythe in the field of stars.”

Stars surround the Earth on all sides; the Earth moves in space. Spero and his companion were aware of this, and perhaps in none of those celestial worlds did any two beings live in more intimate communion than did they, with infinity and with the heavens.

Insensibly, however, and perhaps unconsciously, the young philosopher took up again, desultorily and by degrees, his interrupted studies. Pursuing his researches now with an optimism that he had not hitherto felt, notwithstanding his natural goodness of disposition, he rejected cruel conclusions, because they seemed to him to be due to an incomplete knowledge of causes, beholding as he did, panoramas of nature and humanity under a new light. Iclea also resumed, at least in part, the studies she had commenced with him, but a new and powerful sentiment filled her soul, and her spirit no longer enjoyed, as before, the freedom which is indispensable to intellectual labor. Absorbed in her affection for a being over whom she held complete sway, she saw life only through him, she lived only for him. During the quiet evening hours, when she seated herself at the piano to play a sonata of Chopin, which she was surprised to find that she had not understood before she loved, or to accompany herself on the piano as she sang with her full, pure voice, the Norwegian songs of Grieg and Bull, or the melodies of our own Gounod, it seemed to her, in despite of herself, perhaps, that her beloved was the only auditor capable of understanding these inspirations of the heart. What delightful hours did George spend in the large library in the house at Passy, stretched on the sofa, watching the capricious rings of the smoke of an Oriental cigarette, while Iclea, abandoning herself to the reminiscences of her fancy, sang a sweet Saetergientens Sondag of her native land, the serenade of Don Juan or the Lakes of Lamartine, or, letting her agile fingers run over the keys, dashed off the melodious dream of the minuet of Boccherini!

Spring had come. The month of May witnessed the opening fêtes of the International Exposition at Paris, of which we spoke at the beginning of this narration, and the heights of the garden at Passy sheltered the Eden of two loving hearts.

The father of Iclea, who had been suddenly called to Tunis, had now returned, bringing with him a collection of Arabian arms for his museum at Christiania. It was his intention to return soon to Norway, and it had been agreed between the young Norwegian and her lover, that their marriage was to take place in her native land on the anniversary of the mysterious apparition. Their union was, by its very nature, altogether different from those vulgar liaisons, based either on sensual pleasure or mercenary interest, more or less disguised, which form the greater part of the unions between the sexes. Intellectual culture isolated them in the higher regions of thought; the delicacy of their sentiments kept them in an ideal atmosphere where everything material was forgotten. The extreme sensibility of their nerves, the exquisite refinement of all their feelings plunged them into ecstasies of never-ending delight. If love exist in other worlds it can be neither more profound nor more exquisite than theirs. They might both have afforded the physiologists living proof of the fact that, contrary to the general opinion, all our enjoyments proceed from the ............