When they were gone, I thought about the role of wealth in love. I thought about how wealth is the source of man’s evils and of how love is the source of happiness and light.

I remained lost in these thoughts until I saw two shapes pass before of me. They sat down on the grass— a boy and girl coming from the fields where the farmers have their huts amid their crops. After a long moment of touching silence, I heard these words. They were mixed with the hoarse coughs of the consumptive. “Hold back your tears, Beloved. Love willed to open our eyes and make us its servants so as to give us the blessings of patience and endurance. Hold back your tears and be consoled, for we are bound together in the religion of love. Because of sweet love we can bear the affliction of poverty, the bitterness of misery, the torments of separation. I have no choice but to struggle each day until I win a treasure worthy to lay in your hands, a treasure to aid us in traveling on the journeys of life. Love is God, Beloved. It accepts from us our sighs and these tears as though they were the smoke of incense, and it will recompense us as we deserve. I bid you farewell, Beloved, for I must go before the moon sets.”

Then I heard a soft voice, burning sobs, the voice of a delicate maiden bidding farewell to all the heat of love that was in her limbs and greeting the bitterness of separation and the sweetness of endurance. “Goodbye, Beloved.”

They parted. I sat under the branches of that tree feeling the hands of pity and the mysteries of this strange existence pull at my being.

At that hour I looked toward sleeping nature and thought a long time. I found something unbounded and infinite there, something that could not be bought with money. I found something that could not be effaced by the tears of autumn nor killed by the sorrow of winter. It was something that you cannot find by the lakes of Switzerland nor in the gardens of Italy. I found something that endures, that gives life in spring, that gives fruit in summer. I found love there.

A DIALOGUE OF SPIRITS

A DIALOGUE OF SPIRITS