These were not traits which I could imagine in Strickland.
Love is absorbing; it takes the lover out of himself; the most
clear-sighted, though he may know, cannot realise that his love
will cease; it gives body to what he knows is illusion, and,
knowing it is nothing else, he loves it better than reality.
It makes a man a little more than himself, and at the same
time a little less. He ceases to be himself. He is no longer
an individual, but a thing, an instrument to some purpose
foreign to his ego. Love is never quite devoid of
sentimentality, and Strickland was the least inclined to that
infirmity of any man I have known. I could not believe that
he would ever suffer that possession of himself which love is;
he could never endure a foreign yoke. I believed him capable
of uprooting from his heart, though it might be with agony, so
that he was left battered and ensanguined, anything that came
between himself and that uncomprehended craving that urged him
constantly to he knew not what. If I have succeeded at all in
giving the complicated impression that Strickland made on me,
it will not seem outrageous to say that I felt he was at once
too great and too small for love.
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