_The bawdy wind, that kisses all it meets, Is hushed within the hollow mine of earth, And will not hear it_. He could have borne anything but a soul's tragedy like this: _Alas! to make me A fixed figure for the time of scorn To point his slow unmoving finger at! Yet I could bear that too, well--very well: But there, where I have garnered up my heart, Where I must either live, or bear no life; The fountain from the which my current runs Or else dries up; to be discarded thence! Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads To knot and gender in!_ Whenever he was with her, Desdemona might still be devoted to him. She might only give to Cassio what she could not give to her husband. But to Othello this would be no comfort. The fountain would be polluted '_from which his current runs_'; and though its waters might still flow for him, he would not care to touch them. If this feeling is manifest in such a love as Othello's, much more is it manifest in love of a higher type. It is expressed thus, for instance, by the heroine of Mrs. Craven's '_Recit d'une Soeur_.' '_I can indeed say_,' she says, '_that we never loved each other so much as when we saw how we both loved God:_' and again, '_My husband would not have loved me as he did, if he had not loved God a great deal more._' This language is of course distinctly religious; but it embodies a meaning that is appreciated by the positive school as well. In positivist language it might be expressed thus: '_My husband would not have loved me as he did, if he would not, sooner than love me in any other way, have ceased to love me altogether._' It is clear that this sentiment is proper, nay essential, to positivist affection, just as well as to Christian. Any pure and exalted love would at once change its character, if, without any further change, it merely believed it were free to change it. Its strongest element is the consciousness, not that it is of such a character only, but that this character is the right one. The ideal bride and bridegroom, the ideal man and wife, would not value purity as they are supposed to do, did they not believe that it was not only different from impurity, but essentially and incalculably better than it. For the positivist, just as much as the Christian, this sense of rightness in love is interfused with the affection proper, and does as it were give wings to it. It far more than makes good for the lovers any loss of intensity that may be created by the chastening down of passion: and figuratively at least, it may be said to make them conscious that '_underneath them are the everlasting arms_.'