In a lonely house a youth in the morning of his life sat staring sometimes out the window at a sky adorned with stars and sometimes at the picture of a girl before him. The lines and the colors of the picture were reflected in his face, revealing there the mysteries of this world and the secrets of eternity. The portrait of the woman’s face spoke secretly to him, making his eyes into ears that understood the language of the spirits floating in the air of that room, turning his whole being into hearts bright with love and overflowing with longing.

An hour passed this way as though it were a moment in a pleasant dream or a year in eternity. Finally the youth placed the picture before him, picked up pen and paper, and wrote,

“Beloved of my soul!

“The great truths that are above nature do not pass from one human being to another by means of ordinary human speech. Rather, they choose silence as the path between souls. I know well that the silence of this night hastens between our souls bearing messages more subtle than the words written by the spring breeze on the face of the water. It recites the book of our two hearts to our two hearts. But just as God wills to imprison souls in bodies, it is the will of love to make me a prisoner of words. They say, Beloved, that love is transformed in its servants into a consuming fire. I have found that the hour of separation has been unable to divide the essence of our two spirits, just as I knew at our first meeting that my soul had known yours throughout the ages, just as I knew that my first sight of you was not in reality the first sight. Beloved! That hour bound together our two hearts, exiled from the higher world. That hour was one of those few hours that made firm my faith in the preexistence and immortality of the soul. In hours such as that nature unveils the face of its infinite justice, yet they think it to be tyranny.

“My Beloved, do you remember in that garden, each of us looking into the face of his lover? Do you know that your glances told me that your love for me did not spring from pity? Those glances told me that I could tell myself and all the world that the gift whose source is justice is greater than the gift from charity, that the love created by circumstances is like stagnant waters.