All yearning is love--love that silently and secretly celebrates its triumphal entry into the soul. If you stood at the grave of a joy and felt pain over that which was lost, would not the pain of yearning be the measure, the consciousness, of your newly-awakened, ever-waking love? Would you like to calculate this yearning and exchange therefor coldness and indifference of heart? And if you felt a love so full and deep that moments had eternities concealed in them, even so, on the basis of this love yearning would live more than ever, it would open up to the soul new vistas, new goals, it would give love her life; and a love without yearning, which did not see beyond itself, did not love above itself, finished in that which it was, or it called its own--would quickly cease to be love. Yes, yearning redoubles all genuine love to man; it involves something becoming, something greater, purer, for which love lays the foundation and gives the impulse. Only he who knows yearning, knows what I _love_, so Mignon might have also said. There is something unslaked, unslakable, in every love, an insatiable hunger for more love, for better and purer love. It is this yearning that saves love from being blind; it gives love the strength and courage of veraciousness; it plunges the heart into a struggle of desperation when a man of our love does not keep his promise, when he becomes pettier and baser than we had believed of him; and yet in this struggle it achieves the victory of faith which mounts above all the pettiness and baseness of the man, to the certainty of its strength, that love faileth never. In every love we love something higher than itself, something for which the heart is destined and endowed. This is the yearning in our love, _a will_, which stirs in all deep feeling of the heart, and guards against the death which every moment, sufficient only for itself, harbors. Every love, therefore, is itself a yearning: love for truth is the power to grow beyond _a_ truth; love for righteousness is hunger and thirst after righteousness. In all the beauty that greets the eye and awakens exultation and joy in the heart, the soul ripens new sensitivity for new visions of the wonders of life, the heart widens so that it absorbs strength for new beauty and sees new beauty even in the darkness and dust of earth. A man without yearning is a man without love. And if one would guarantee man that satisfaction which one prizes as the most beautiful and most blissful lot on earth, then one must first stifle his heart or tear it from his breast; for as long as this heart still beats, and announces in every beat its insatiable hunger for love, so long will the man harbor and feel his yearning, which will not let the beating heart be satisfied.