"During several following weeks we met many times, and yet, in looking back to that dream of heaven, I cannot tell how often, nor for how long. Time is merely the measure given to past emotions, and those emotions flowed over me in a tidal sweep which merged all details in one continuous memory. The lone hemisphere of my life was rounded into completeness, and its feverish unrest changed to deep tranquillity, as if a faint, tremulous star were transmuted into a calm, full-orbed planet. Do you remember that story of Plato's--I recall the air-woven subtilties of the delightful idealist, to illustrate, not to prove--that story of the banquet where the ripe wines of the Aegean Isles unchained the tongues of such talkers as Pausanias and Socrates and others as witty and wise, until they fell into a discourse on the origin of Love, and, whirling away on the sparkling eddies of fancy, were borne to that preëxistent sphere which, in Plato's opinion, furnished the key to all the enigmas of this? There they beheld the complete and original souls, the compound of male and female, dual and yet one, so happy and so haughty in their perfection of beauty and of power that Jupiter could not tolerate his godlike rivals, and therefore cut them asunder, sending the dissevered halves tumbling down to earth, bewildered and melancholy enough, until some good fortune might restore to each the _alter ego_ which constituted the divine unity. 'And thus,' says Plato, 'whenever it happens that a man meets with his other half, the very counterpart of himself, they are both smitten with strong love; they recognize their ancient union; they are powerfully attracted by the consciousness that they belong to each other; and they are unwilling to be again parted, even for a short time. And if Vulcan were to stand over them with his fire and forge, and offer to melt them down and run them together, and of two to make them one again, they would both say that this was just what they desired!' "I dare say you have read--unless your partiality for the soft Southern tongues has chased away your Teutonic taste--that exquisite poem of Schiller's, 'Das Geheimnitz der Reminiscenz,' the happiest possible crystallization of the same theory. I recall a few lines from Bulwer's fine translation:-- "'Why from its lord doth thus my soul depart? Is it because its native home thou art? Or were they brothers in the days of yore, Twin-bound both souls, and in the links they bore Sigh to be bound once more? "'Were once our beings blent and intertwining, And therefore still my heart for thine is pining? Knew we the light of some extinguished sun,-- The joys remote of some bright realm undone, Where once our souls were ONE? "'Yes, it is so! And thou wert bound to me In the long-vanished eld eternally! In the dark troubled tablets which enroll The past my Muse beheld this blessed scroll,-- 'One with thy love, my soul'!"