Shortly after, Comte set himself to work overhauling all the foolish things he had said about the necessity of celibacy.  He declared that a man without his mate only stumbled his way through life.  There was the male man and the female man, and only by working together could these two souls hope to progress.  It requires two to generate thought.  Comte felt sure that he was writing the final word.  He avowed that there was no more to say.  He declared that should his wife go hence the fountains of his soul would dry up, his mind would famish, and the light of his life would go out in darkness.

The gods were envious of such love as this.

Comte’s mate passed away.

He was stricken dumb; the calamity was too great for speech or tears.

But five years after, he got down his books and went over his manuscripts and again revised his philosophy of what constitutes the true condition for the highest and purest thought.  To have known a great and exalted love and have it fade from your grasp and flee as shadow, living only in memory, is the highest good, he wrote.  A great sorrow at one stroke purchases a redemption from all petty troubles; it sinks all trivial annoyances into nothingness, and grants the man lifelong freedom from all petty, corroding cares.  His feelings have been sounded to their depths—­the plummet has touched bottom.  Fate has done her worst:  she has brought him face to face with the Supreme Calamity, and thereafter there is nothing that can inspire terror.

The memory of a great love can never die from out the heart.  It affords a ballast ’gainst all the storms that blow.  And although it lends an unutterable sadness, it imparts an unspeakable peace.

A great love, even when fully possessed, affords no complete gratification.  There is an essence in it that eludes all ownership.  Its highest use seems to be a purifying impulse for nobler endeavor.  It says at the last, “Arise, and get thee hence, for this is not thy rest.”

Where there is this haunting memory of a great love lost there is always forgiveness, charity, and a sympathy that makes the man brother to all who endure and suffer.  The individual himself is nothing; he has nothing to hope for, nothing to gain, nothing to win, nothing to lose; for the first time and the last he has a selflessness that is wide as the world, and wherein there is no room for the recollection of a wrong.  In this memory of a great love, there is a nourishing source of strength by which the possessor lives and works; he is in communication with elemental conditions.

Harriet Martineau was a lifelong widow of the heart.  That first great passion of her early womanhood, the love that was lost, remained with her all the days of her life:  springing fresh every morning, her last thought as she closed her eyes at night.  Other loves came to her, attachments varying in nature and degree, but in this supreme love all was fused and absorbed.  In this love, you get the secret of power.