Love gives beauty to everything it touches. Not greed and utility; they produce offices, but not dwelling houses. To be able to love material things, to clothe them with tender grace, and yet not be attached to them, this is a great service. Providence expects that we should make this world our own, and not live in it as though it were a rented tenement. We can only make it our own through some service, and that service is to lend it love and beauty from our soul. Your own experience shows you the difference between the beautiful, the tender, the hospitable, and the mechanically neat and monotonously useful. Want of love is a degree of callousness; for love is the perfection of consciousness. We do not love because we do not comprehend, or rather we do not comprehend because we do not love. For love is the ultimate meaning of everything around us. It is not a mere sentiment; it is truth; it is the joy that is at the root of all creation. Let us not pray to be sheltered from dangers but to be fearless when facing them. Love does not claim possession, but gives freedom. Love adorns itself; it seeks to prove inward joy by outward beauty. Life's errors cry for the merciful beauty that can modulate their isolation into a harmony with the whole. Life, like a child, laughs, shaking its rattle of death as it runs. Let your life lightly dance on the edges of Time like dew on the tip of a leaf. Life is given to us, we earn it by giving it. Love is the only reality and it is not a mere sentiment. It is the ultimate truth that lies at the heart of creation. | 
