The vanity of the passing world and love are the two fundamental and
heart-penetrating notes of true poetry. And they are two notes of which
neither can be sounded without causing the other to vibrate. The feeling
of the vanity of the passing world kindles love in us, the only thing
that triumphs over the vain and transitory, the only thing that fills
life again and eternalizes it. In appearance at any rate, for in
reality.... And love, above all when it struggles against destiny,
overwhelms us with the feeling of the vanity of this world of
appearances and gives us a glimpse of another world, in which destiny is
overcome and liberty is law.
Everything passes! Such is the refrain of those who have drunk, lips to
the spring, of the fountain of life, of those who have tasted of the
fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.
To be, to be for ever, to be without ending! thirst of being, thirst of
being more! hunger of God! thirst of love eternalizing and eternal! to
be for ever! to be God!
"Ye shall be as gods!" we are told in Genesis that the serpent said to
the first pair of lovers (Gen. iii. 5). "If in this life only we have
hope in Christ, we are of all men most miserable," wrote the Apostle (1
Cor. xv. 19); and all religion has sprung historically from the cult of
the dead--that is to say, from the cult of immortality.
The tragic Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam wrote that the free man thinks of
nothing less than of death; but this free man is a dead man, free from
the impulse of life, for want of love, the slave of his liberty.
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