[6] Love is life; it is to hold one’s soul, one’s senses, one’s heart, open ever to the great, the beautiful; to be capable of extremes, of lofty virtues and lowest crimes; to understand the infinite, the vastness, Nature and God, to enjoy the fields; the birds, the flowers, solitary murmurs; to seek sadness, solitude, the desert, to fill the heart with laughter and festivity; and to inundate the smiling fête, the laughter of our soul, with fountains of tears; to know pleasure and misfortune at the same time and to be at once the happiest and the most wretched of mortals: This is love, the love of which one dies. To love, and not know, not possess the courage to speak the love we feel within us; to fear lest profane eyes cast their defiling glance into the temple where is concentrated the best portion of our lives; where like misers we conceal this fountain of love, these inexhaustible treasures of flourishing illusions; to feel the presence of the adored one, though she be not seen, to understand, without hearing her speak, her thoughts; to follow her, without being able to gaze into her eyes; to love her without being able to say that we love. And, fearing to brush her garments, to burn to stifle her in a thousand embraces. This is love, the love of which one dies! [7] It were beautiful to feel in one’s brain the soul of Goethe, and to unite in his body Byron, Homer and Dante. To dream in the delirium of a moment that one is the soul of creation and the sound sent forth by the palpitant earth. [8] Hell contains exquisite beauties, Cleopatras, Helenas, Eleonoras; there is where one falls in love in good company. There can’t be a hell with ladies around! [9] But if Werther longed to see Carlotta giving bread and butter to the children and found her thus more beautiful than ever, I adore you all the more when I vision you doing the laundry. [10] Why judge from the face--the face,--that mask of flesh which man received on entering the world,--that which goes on within? Almost always if it is summer on one’s face, it is winter in the soul. I confess before you; hear, contented ones! My laughter is feigned; yes, a thousand times I stifle with it the echoes of a groan that of a sudden rises to my lips; a thousand times upon the tempered strings I play, in accompaniment to my song fall tears. I pretend before you, for in the house of mirth pretence is the sad man’s prudence. [11] The same poet, in Verissimo’s words, is the singer of “love and saudade. These two feelings are the soul of his poetry.” _Estudos_, II, 47.