INCE the world began, unselfish love has been the highest outreach of the human heart and the heart's richest blessing. To be loved unselfishly, to be loved for one's own sake, and to be sure of such a love in spite of all lack or failure on one's own part, is a cause of unfailing joy to the gladdest soul or to the saddest. A consciousness of such a love has uplifted the lowliest peasant to a height that no throne of earth could secure. to its possessor; and it has been more to the occupant of the loftiest throne than all his royal treasures and prerogatives. It has nerved the cowardly to acts of heroism, and has given added grace to the heroic daring of the bravest. It has won the evil-minded to a life of goodness, and has brought the purest-hearted to a holier consecration of himself and all his powers to God. It has enabled the sufferer to endure, and the hopeless to hope. It has brought light into the gloom of the despairing, and has given to the sorrowing a foretaste of heavenly joys. This transfiguring power of a sense of being loved unselfishly it is that Elizabeth Barrett bore testimony to, while she still felt that it was her duty to refuse as a lover him of whom she would be always sure as a friend: 'Go from me. Yet I feel that I shall stand Henceforward in thy shadow. Nevermore Without the sense of that which I forbore,— "The face of all the world is changed, I think, Because thy name moves right in what they say." It is good to have a friend, but it is better to be a friend. The gain of being unselfishly loved and sympa thized with and helped and cheered is not to be compared with the gain of unselfishly loving and sympathizing with and helping and cheering another. No glad incoming to one's heart from without can uplift and enlarge it like the expansive force of a generous and self-forgetting love outworking from within. Not only is it more glorious to be a central sun than to absorb a measure of the sun's light and warmth, but the soul, which is more than a sun, is made newly glorious in an inspired endeavor to reach with its out-sent beams an object that has called forth a reverent purpose of praise and homage and service unknown to it before. He who has a pure and unselfish love for any one being in the universe, has thereby a new life, new powers, new possibilities, and new perceptions of all; and the very universe itself is a new universe to him, as viewed from his new center of love and light. Thus it was that Dante experienced the transfiguring power of his unselfish love at every fresh sight of her to whom he was a true friend, when he bore witness to the marvelous effects of such a vision: "There no longer remained to me an enemy; nay, a flame of charity possessed me which made me pardon every one who had done me wrong; and had any one at that time questioned me of anything, my only answer would have been 'Love,' and my face would have been clothed with humility." And Emerson gives like assurance of his gain through friendship, in its transfiguring light over all that he sees, and over himself as the seer: “O friend, my bosom said, Through thee alone the sky is arched, All things through thee take nobler form, The mill-round of our fate appears Me too thy nobleness has taught The fountains of my hidden life Are through thy friendship fair." To be loved unselfishly is a blessing. To love unselfishly is a greater blessing. A union in a love that is reciprocally unselfish is the greatest blessing of all. When he who loves unselfishly is unselfishly loved by the object of his affection, so that each of the two loses himself, and finds more than himself, in the other, life seems to be all that life can be here, and to have promise of more than all that can here be gained. So far from such an unselfish union of souls making either soul selfish in its satisfaction with itself or with the other, its inspirations are sure to cause ceaseless and unsatisfied, though ever hopeful, aspirations after that which it newly opens to view, and toward which it impels. Thus Michael Angelo, with all his extraordinary power of perceiving truth and beauty, confesses to new visions of loveliness in the realms of mind and matter, in the added light from the eyes of his young friend, Tommaso de' Cavalieri: "Through thee I catch a gleam of tender glow, With thee my groveling thoughts I heavenward raise Cold in the sun and warm in winter days. When the sun's fiery rays are o'er her thrown."1 And it is of this transforming influence of a merging of soul with soul in unselfish and aspiring love, that Schiller tells in his address to his friend Körner as "Raphael:' "Did not the same strong mainspring urge and guide Our hearts to meet in love's eternal bond? Happy, oh, happy-I have found thee; I Have out of millions found thee, and embraced; "Do I not find within thy radiant eyes Friendship-love, as a love that is unselfish, uncraving, ever out-going, and ever on-going, is in its very nature divine love. It is such a love as God gives, and as man 1 J. A. Symonds's translation. 2 Bulwer's translation. |