{"product_id":"2940016176505","title":"In Love with Love: four life-studies","description":"An excerpt from the beginning of the first chapter:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTRANSFIGURATIONS.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eTransfigurations ! These are many in human life, or may be many, both in number and in kind. I will speak first of what may be called visible, or physical, transfigurations,— transfigurations, that is to say, of body. Afterwards I will treat of character-transfigurations, —transfigurations, that is, moral, mental and spiritual in men's experience. And finally, in a word or two, of the transfiguration of the race — the exaltation of humanity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf visible, bodily transfigurations we certainly all have known. They are frequent. And there is oftentimes great joy in observing them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSome relative or friend, it may be, has been upon a bed of pain, until the wasting away has been all but complete. Cheeks are sunken, limbs emaciated, color long since gone utterly. But the tide of illness turns, and health begins. Every day, now, there is gain; — in the force of the life-currents that speed through the arteries and veins, in the rounding out of face and limbs once more, in the depth of the hue of health upon the cheeks. And how beautiful and satisfying it all is! It is like the joy and beauty of the Springtime, after the bareness and sadness of winter fields.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnd if the transfiguration has not been thus; if the tide of illness has not been turned, but has swept on ruthlessly, until the \" transfiguration\" has been that solemn and mysterious transfiguration which in our ignorance we call \"death,\" how beautiful and joyful that also! The sleep as of pure marble; the transfiguration of the Angel of the Dawn — the transfiguration into rest and peace. For all is fair and good, and life and death forevermore are one to the preserving power which in its bosom holds and shelters all.\u003cbr\u003eOr, father, mother, let me ask, What has happened to your boy, your girl ? — he or she who was your \"baby\" only a month or two ago. You turn some day \u003cbr\u003eto look for your boy. You do not find him. You see in his place a young man. And your girl has become a young woman. The childish plays, the treble voices, are gone; the deepening tones of the boy, which have come with development of chest and with strength of bone and muscle, startle you backward of a sudden, to a period twenty or twenty-five years before, when you yourself were as he — on the boundary-line of manhood, and looking over! Or your girl, mother, carries you back suddenly, as with the wave of a magic wand, to the hour when first you dreamed that \"life is Beauty,\"—yet woke full soon to know that, if indeed Beauty, it is Duty also, and Duty first, in order that the true Beauty may be.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eYet, with all your hopes and fears and anxieties as to what now so speedily must befall the child, whether boy or girl, with what eye of parental pride and satisfaction you behold the mysterious, the mighty \" transfiguration \" which has come about. And perhaps, as you observe it and wonder over it, rejoicing, farther back yet fly your thoughts,— many times twenty years,— to the words of the writer who, in another hemisphere and civilization altogether from yours, yet with what appropriateness now also, wrote of a certain growing Galilean lad that continually he \"increased in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man \"; and you hope your boy may grow to be, in steadfastness of character, such a man as that lad grew to be. The might of the \" transfiguration\" which now delights your eye will not then have been in vain, and meaningless.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOr, again, there is the slow transfiguration which often comes about in the body of a man or woman who, after years of \" animalism \" (as we only can call it),— of dissipation or mere brute living; of sensual gratifications and simple pandering to appetites,— strives to throw all this off, and to stand up once more, towards the last, in the true guise of true humanity. No one ever yet quit a hurtful physical habit, of whatever nature, or took up lines of thought growth and soul-growth, that the body, at once, as well as the mind, did not spring forward to enjoy the new birth and come into its share of the blessing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"For soul is form, and doth the body make.\"","brand":"OGB","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47074365898992,"sku":"2940016176505","price":0.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/2940016176505_p0.jpg?v=1763630600","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/2940016176505","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}