Love has its childishness, and other passions have their littleness. Shame on the passions that makes a man little! Honor to the one which makes him a child! It is a strange thing, are you aware of it? I am in the night. There is a being who vanished and took heaven with her. Oh! to lie side by side in the same tomb, hand in hand, and to gently caress a finger from time to time in the darkness, would suffice for my eternity. You who suffer because you love, love more than ever. To die of love is to live through it. Love, a gloomy starry transfiguration, is mingled with this punishment, and there is ecstasy in the agony. Oh, joy of birds! they sing because they have the nest. Love is the celestial breathing of the atmosphere of Paradise. Profound hearts, wise minds, take life as God makes it; it is a long trial, an unintelligible preparation for the unknown destiny. This destiny, the true one, begins for man with the first step in the interior of the tomb. Then something appears to him, and he begins to distinguish the definite. The definite, reflect on that word. The living see the infinite, but the definite only shows itself to the dead. In the mean while, love and suffer, hope and contemplate. Woe, alas, to the man who has only loved bodies, shapes, and appearances! Death will strip him of all that. Try to love souls, and you will meet them again. I have met in the street a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat worn, the elbows in holes; the water passed through his shoes, and the stars through his soul. What a grand thing it is to be loved! What a grander thing still to love! The heart becomes heroic by the might of passion. Henceforth it is composed of nought but what is pure, and is only supported by what is elevated and great. An unworthy thought can no more germinate in it than a nettle on a glacier. The lofty and serene soul, inaccessible to emotions and vulgar passions, soaring above the clouds and shadows of the world,--follies, falsehoods, hatreds, vanities, and miseries,--dwells in the azure of the sky, and henceforth only feels the profound and subterranean heavings of destiny as the summit of the mountains feels earthquakes. If there were nobody who loved, the sun would be extinguished. CHAPTER V. COSETTE AFTER THE LETTER.