In the vast and luminous tapestry of English literature, few poems capture the intoxicating paradox of human emotion with the crystalline precision and heartfelt urgency found in Thomas Paine's "What Is Love?". This remarkable work, emerging from the pen of one of history's most incendiary political philosophers, invites readers into a profound meditation on love's transcendent joys and its capacity for profound torment. Far from the fiery polemics that defined Paine's public legacy—those thunderous calls for liberty and reason that reshaped nations—this poem reveals a more intimate, vulnerable facet of his intellect and spirit. It pulses with an enthusiasm for the poetic art itself, that magical medium capable of distilling life's grandest mysteries into words that resonate across centuries. As we delve into its historical and cultural milieu, its masterful deployment of literary devices, its rich thematic layers, and its enduring emotional power, we discover not only a testament to Paine's versatility but also a timeless reflection on the human condition that continues to stir the soul with remarkable force.

To fully appreciate this poem, one must situate it within the turbulent historical and cultural currents of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Thomas Paine, born in 1737 in rural England, rose to become a pivotal figure in the Age of Enlightenment and the revolutionary fervor that swept the Atlantic world. His seminal works, Common Sense and The Rights of Man, electrified readers by championing republican ideals, natural rights, and the rejection of hereditary tyranny. By the time this poem was composed around 1800, Paine had lived a life of extraordinary adventure and adversity. Having played a crucial role in the American Revolution, he immersed himself in the French Revolution, enduring imprisonment during the Reign of Terror. His later years were marked by personal struggles, financial instability, and a deepening engagement with philosophical and deistic thought, as evidenced in The Age of Reason. 

This period in Paine's life—often spent in Paris or reflecting on transatlantic connections—coincided with a broader cultural shift. The Enlightenment's emphasis on reason coexisted uneasily with the burgeoning Romantic sensibility, which celebrated emotion, individualism, and the sublime. Poets like William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were beginning to explore the inner landscapes of the heart, while earlier influences from neoclassical writers and metaphysical poets lingered. Paine, ever the bridge between rational inquiry and passionate conviction, crafted this poem in a context where love was not merely a private affair but intertwined with larger questions of morality, society, and human perfectibility. Addressed to Mrs. Robert Smyth in a letter to her husband Sir Robert Smyth, it reflects the sociable, epistolary culture of the era, where personal verses served as gestures of friendship and intellectual exchange amid political upheaval. In a world recovering from revolution and grappling with the Napoleonic wars, Paine's exploration of love's dualities offered a poignant counterpoint to the era's grand narratives of power and conflict, reminding readers that the battles of the heart could be as consequential as those on the battlefield.

Biographically, the poem gains added resonance from Paine's own experiences with love and loss. Married twice—first to Mary Lambert, whose early death left him bereft, and later to Elizabeth Ollive, a union that ended in separation—Paine knew both the heights of affection and the sting of relational discord. His writings occasionally touched on domestic themes, including critiques of unhappy marriages, revealing a thinker attuned to the personal costs of emotional entanglement. In his later life, amid declining health and political isolation in America after his return, such verses suggest a man seeking solace in contemplation. This personal dimension infuses the poem with authenticity; it is not abstract philosophy but lived wisdom, filtered through the lens of one who had witnessed humanity's greatest triumphs and follies. Philosophically, it echoes Enlightenment figures like John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who pondered the interplay of passion and reason, while anticipating Romantic explorations of the sublime and the irrational. Paine's deistic worldview, which revered a rational creator yet acknowledged mystery, finds voice here in love's ineffable quality—a force both divine and dangerously human.

At the heart of the poem lies its sophisticated use of literary devices, which elevate a personal reflection into a universal inquiry. Paine employs vivid metaphor with striking economy, transforming abstract concepts into tangible, sensory experiences. Love is depicted as a "delightful transport" that "pours magic o'er the soul," evoking movement, enchantment, and fluidity. This alchemical imagery aligns with Enlightenment interests in natural philosophy and transformation, suggesting love as a catalyst that transmutes ordinary existence into something extraordinary. The inability of art to capture love is rendered through a series of rhetorical questions and analogies: comparing the challenge to describing "sun-beams to the blind" or making one "feel a shadow with his mind." These similes draw on sensory deprivation to underscore ineffability, a device reminiscent of Platonic dialogues where ultimate truths elude direct representation. Such techniques create a sense of humility before the sublime, inviting readers to feel the limits of language even as the poem masterfully transcends them.

Personification animates the poem's emotional landscape. "Happy Love" becomes an active agent that "pours magic," while "Contemplation spreads its rainbow wings," infusing the scene with color, flight, and divine grace. This avian imagery evokes freedom and elevation, contrasting sharply with later depictions of "jealous fury" who "throws her poison'd dart" and rends the heart. The shift from benevolent to malevolent forces personifies internal psychological states as external actors, a technique that heightens dramatic tension and mirrors classical traditions from Greek tragedy to Shakespearean soliloquies. Antithesis structures the poem's core argument, pitting ecstasy against horror, liberty against slavery, and kindness against torture. This binary opposition is not simplistic but dialectical, reflecting Paine's political habit of exposing contradictions to advocate balance and reform. In love, as in governance, unchecked power corrupts; the "tyrant" love enslaves the soul just as monarchs once oppressed nations.

Imagery of light and darkness further enriches the text. Blissful sections shimmer with "rainbow wings," "rapture," and "ecstasy," suggesting illumination and moral clarity—"love can teach a moral to the mind." The darker turn plunges into "dreadful horrors of a dismal mind," a "dark den," and "iron chains," evoking confinement, poison, and existential dread. This chiaroscuro effect, akin to techniques in Romantic painting or Miltonic epic, underscores love's transformative potential for both salvation and damnation. The poem's philosophical depth emerges in its treatment of thought as the ultimate arbiter: "The hardest chains to break, are those of thought." Here, Paine channels Stoic and Enlightenment rationalism, positing the mind as both prison and liberator. Lovers are exhorted to "Think well," a call to reflective empathy that bridges personal emotion with ethical responsibility.

The themes of the poem resonate profoundly with broader intellectual currents. Central is the duality of love: its role as the "first of all felicities below" versus its potential for tyranny. This echoes philosophical traditions from Plato's Symposium, where love ascends from physical desire to ideal beauty, to Christian notions of agape tempered by warnings against idolatry. Paine, the deist, secularizes this, grounding love in human experience while hinting at transcendent "magic." The ineffability theme critiques purely descriptive art, privileging direct emotional apprehension—a proto-Romantic stance that values feeling over neoclassical restraint. Yet it remains anchored in moral instruction: love, at its best, fosters kindness and ethical awareness; at its worst, it breeds jealousy and despair. This moral dimension aligns with Paine's lifelong advocacy for human rights and social harmony, suggesting that personal relationships mirror societal ones. Jealousy as "poison'd dart" evokes the destructive passions Rousseau warned could undermine the social contract, while the call for kindness prefigures modern psychological insights into emotional intelligence.

Comparatively, the poem invites dialogue with other literary explorations of love. Unlike the idealized sonnets of Shakespeare, which often celebrate constancy amid adversity, Paine confronts love's shadow side with unflinching honesty, much like John Donne's metaphysical conceits that blend eroticism and spirituality. It anticipates the Romantic poets' fascination with intense emotion—Wordsworth's "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" or Byron's brooding heroes trapped by passion. Yet Paine's restraint and didactic close distinguish it, blending sensibility with reason in a manner true to his character. In the American context, it complements the works of contemporaries like Philip Freneau, infusing revolutionary zeal with domestic tenderness. Philosophically, it dialogues with Immanuel Kant's distinctions between inclination and duty, or Arthur Schopenhauer's later pessimism regarding the will's torments, positioning love as a force requiring vigilant mastery.

The emotional impact of "What Is Love?" is immediate and lasting, capable of evoking a spectrum of responses that mirror its thematic range. Readers are first lifted by the euphoric depiction of love's delights: the "sweet delirium," gliding moments, and repeated raptures in dreams create a visceral sense of joy and connection. This section resonates with anyone who has experienced infatuation's glow, stirring nostalgia and aspiration. The pivot to darkness delivers a gut-wrenching contrast, the "distracted heart" and suicidal ideation in the "grave" confronting the terror of obsessive love. Such raw acknowledgment of pain fosters empathy and catharsis, warning without alienating. The concluding admonition—"Think well of this, ye lovers, and be kind"—lands with gentle authority, inspiring reflection and hope. Poetry's power lies in this alchemy: transforming personal vulnerability into shared wisdom. Paine's verse, though rooted in its time, transcends it, offering solace to modern readers navigating love in an age of digital connections and psychological awareness. Its enthusiasm for love's potential, tempered by caution, affirms poetry's role as both mirror and lamp, illuminating the heart's complexities while guiding toward better paths.

One cannot overlook how the poem exemplifies Paine's broader contribution to literature as a vehicle for enlightenment. While his prose pamphlets mobilized masses, his poetry accesses subtler realms of imagination. As he himself noted in reflections on the creative process, poetry ventures into fields where reason alone falters, allowing for a fuller exploration of human experience. This piece stands as a bridge in his oeuvre, humanizing the revolutionary who championed abstract rights by delving into the intimate emotions that underpin them. In an era when political writing often overshadowed personal expression, such verses remind us of the wholeness of great minds. They encourage contemporary appreciation of poetry not as escapist fancy but as essential to understanding liberty—in the soul as in society.

Delving deeper into its cultural resonance, the poem engages with eighteenth-century debates on sensibility. Writers like Laurence Sterne and Jane Austen probed emotion's refinements and pitfalls; Paine adds a radical edge by linking personal kindness to broader ethical reform. The "moral to the mind" taught by love suggests an optimistic anthropology, akin to his belief in humanity's perfectibility through reason and compassion. This counters Calvinist gloom or Hobbesian cynicism, affirming love's civilizing force when rightly directed. Yet the acknowledgment of its tyrannical potential injects realism, preventing naive idealism. In this balance lies the poem's enduring appeal: it neither romanticizes nor dismisses passion but equips readers to navigate it wisely.

Emotionally, the work's impact is amplified by its rhythmic flow and sonic qualities, which, though not the focus here, contribute to a hypnotic quality that draws readers into its world. The progression from wonder to warning to wisdom creates a narrative arc akin to a miniature psychological journey, fostering identification and growth. For those familiar with Paine's fiery rhetoric, this gentler voice surprises and delights, revealing depths that enrich his legacy. It invites us to reread his political works through the lens of empathetic understanding, seeing rights advocacy as rooted in profound care for human flourishing.

In conclusion, Thomas Paine's "What Is Love?" stands as a masterful achievement in poetic inquiry, weaving historical context, literary artistry, thematic richness, and emotional profundity into a cohesive whole. It celebrates love's ecstatic heights while cautioning against its abyssal risks, urging kindness as the antidote to suffering. In doing so, it exemplifies poetry's unique capacity to move, enlighten, and transform. As enthusiasts of the form, we find in this verse not only intellectual stimulation but a heartfelt resonance that affirms our shared humanity. Paine, the tireless champion of liberty, here liberates the language of the heart, reminding us that true freedom encompasses both the bold strokes of revolution and the tender deliberations of affection. This poem endures as an invitation to live more thoughtfully, love more generously, and appreciate the wondrous, perilous beauty of that most fundamental human experience. Its message, forged in the crucible of revolutionary times, speaks with fresh vitality today, inspiring generations to ponder, with renewed wonder and wisdom, the eternal question: What is love? 

Charles Lamb’s “Thoughtless Cruelty” transforms an incident so ordinary that it might otherwise disappear from memory—the killing of a fly—into a searching meditation on moral attention. Its subject is minute, domestic, and almost absurdly familiar: a child, Robert, has killed an insect. Yet Lamb refuses the scale of the creature as a measure of the act’s seriousness. In a few poised and admonitory movements, the poem asks what it means to take a life without need, to dismiss pain because its bearer is small, and to use one’s superior power merely for amusement. The result is a poem of remarkable ethical concentration. It is also a poem that demonstrates Lamb’s distinctive literary gift: an ability to let a simple scene carry emotional, philosophical, and even theological weight without sacrificing clarity or warmth.

The poem’s directness is central to its power. It begins not with description or abstraction, but with an address: “There, Robert, you have kill’d that fly.” The opening word, “There,” has the force of a finger pointed toward an accomplished fact. It suggests both immediate observation and moral arrest: look at what has happened. Robert is not permitted to hide behind vagueness, accident, or the habitual indifference often granted to childhood. The deed is named plainly. Lamb’s speaker then makes the irreversibility of that deed the foundation of his argument: even if Robert tried for “thousand ages,” he could not restore the life he has taken. The hyperbole is purposeful. A fly’s life may seem fleeting, but the inability to recreate it remains absolute. Human power can destroy in an instant what it cannot generate over eternity.

That insistence on irreversibility gives the poem a grave undertone. Lamb does not merely say that killing the fly was unkind; he reminds Robert that life is not an object that can be replaced once damaged. The argument anticipates ethical ideas often associated with later environmental and animal-centered thought: a living being possesses a reality that exceeds its usefulness to human beings. The fly is not valuable because it serves Robert, because it is beautiful, or because it is rare. Its value begins in the fact that it is alive. The speaker’s moral vision thus resists an instrumental habit of mind, the tendency to evaluate creatures according to their convenience, charm, or apparent importance. A fly can be irritating, unnoticed, or short-lived, but none of these facts makes its needless destruction morally empty.

The address to “Robert” gives the poem the character of an intimate lesson rather than a detached philosophical treatise. Lamb’s speaker sounds reproachful, certainly, but his rebuke is directed toward moral awakening rather than humiliation. Robert represents a child whose action has arisen from “thoughtless” impulse, and the title identifies this absence of reflection as the deepest problem. Cruelty, Lamb suggests, does not always begin in monstrous malice. It may arise from inattention: the failure to imagine another creature’s experience, the failure to pause before acting, the failure to understand that one’s own power has consequences. This is a crucial distinction. By locating cruelty in thoughtlessness, the poem makes its ethical demand both gentler and more demanding. The child is not declared innately wicked, but he is called to develop conscience.

Lamb’s language repeatedly balances accusation with instruction. When the speaker says Robert must have been “devoid / Of thought and sense,” the phrase initially seems severe. But “thought” and “sense” are capacities that can be cultivated. The poem therefore imagines moral education as an education of perception. To become humane is to see more accurately: to recognize that the small creature before one is not merely a buzzing annoyance but a vulnerable body, an individual life, and a possible site of pain. The warning that Robert will “one day rue it” extends the lesson into the future. This is not necessarily a prediction of supernatural punishment. More subtly, it suggests that a maturing person may look back with shame upon acts performed before sympathy had fully developed. Conscience is presented as a form of retrospective knowledge, a painful but necessary growth in awareness.

The poem anticipates Robert’s defense with considerable dramatic intelligence. “’Twas but a fly perhaps you’ll say,” the speaker imagines him answering. This phrase encapsulates the casual logic Lamb wants to challenge. The word “but” performs an act of reduction: it turns a living creature into an exception to moral concern. Lamb then allows the argument some apparent force. The fly is “born in April, dies in May”; it barely learns “to display / His wings” before it vanishes. In other words, its existence is visibly brief and precarious. Rather than denying this brevity, Lamb makes it the basis for greater compassion. A life already limited by season, weather, predation, and mortality does not need human frivolity to shorten it further. Fragility becomes not a reason for disregard but a reason for care.

This reversal is among the poem’s finest ethical insights. Human beings often assume that what is brief is less significant, as though duration alone determined worth. Lamb contests that assumption. The fly’s momentary life is vividly rendered through the image of newly displayed wings, an image that grants the insect delicacy and animation. The fly’s brief emergence into the world resembles a miniature version of the larger condition of mortal life: one appears, moves, encounters danger, and disappears. Lamb’s attention to this tiny span evokes a broader tradition of meditative poetry in which transient natural forms—flowers, insects, seasonal creatures—become emblems of human impermanence. Yet the poem does not sentimentalize mortality. Its point is not merely that the fly’s life is beautiful because it is short; it is that brevity never authorizes needless violence.

The poem’s treatment of the bird introduces an important distinction between natural necessity and human choice. A bird may devour the fly “in his flight,” but the bird “seeks his proper food.” Predation is not presented as idyllic or painless; rather, it belongs to an economy of survival. The bird acts from need. Lamb’s ethical contrast depends on this fact. Robert does not kill from hunger, defense, or unavoidable necessity. He kills “for sport.” That phrase is devastating because it exposes a moral void at the center of the action. What separates the child’s act from the bird’s is not simply species difference, but motive. The bird’s violence is embedded in the conditions of animal life; Robert’s is an exercise of optional power. The poem thereby develops an ethics not of absolute noninterference, but of responsibility for avoidable harm.

The reference to “Providence” deepens this distinction and situates the poem within a religious culture in which nature was often understood as ordered, sustained, and ultimately governed by divine wisdom. Lamb’s Providence is not invoked to provide easy comfort. It does not erase the fly’s death or suggest that suffering is insignificant. Instead, it marks a limit to human authority. If the same power that gave the fly life may “justly take it,” then Robert cannot casually claim a similar right. The theological argument is hierarchical in one sense—God’s sovereignty differs from human agency—but it is also humbling. Human beings do not own the lives around them. They participate in a world whose creatures have origins and destinies beyond human convenience.

For modern readers, the appeal to Providence may seem to belong to a historical moral vocabulary rather than to a universally shared theology. Yet the underlying principle remains compelling even in secular terms. Lamb distinguishes between the fact that death is universal and the claim that any agent is therefore entitled to cause death without reason. This distinction is philosophically powerful. Mortality is not permission. The inevitability of loss does not make deliberate harm trivial. One might express Lamb’s insight today through the language of ecological interdependence, animal sentience, or rights and responsibilities, but the poem’s essential moral pressure remains unchanged: because living beings are vulnerable to forces beyond their control, those who possess power over them should exercise restraint.

“Thoughtless Cruelty” belongs to an early nineteenth-century culture in which questions of sensibility, education, domestic morality, and humanity toward animals were increasingly visible. The period saw rapid urban growth and industrial transformation, developments that could alter people’s felt relationship to animals and to the natural world. At the same time, public concern about animal suffering began to find more organized expression in social reform, philanthropic discourse, and debates about conduct. The early nineteenth century witnessed the emergence of formal efforts to prevent cruelty to animals, reflecting a wider conviction that kindness toward vulnerable creatures was connected to the moral health of individuals and societies. Lamb’s poem does not offer political legislation or abstract theory, but it participates in this cultural climate by treating compassion as a habit that should be taught early and practiced in ordinary life.

The poem’s focus on a child is especially significant in this context. Childhood, in Romantic and post-Romantic writing, often became a privileged site for thinking about innocence, feeling, education, and the formation of character. Writers of the period did not always agree on whether children were naturally pure, naturally unruly, or simply impressionable; Lamb’s poem treats Robert as impressionable in the most hopeful sense. The child’s act is wrong, but it can become the occasion for instruction. Such instruction is not merely disciplinary. It asks Robert to imagine the life of another being. In this respect, the poem treats sympathy as an imaginative faculty. To feel for the fly, one must move beyond one’s immediate human viewpoint and acknowledge an experience that cannot speak for itself.

Charles Lamb’s wider literary character helps clarify the peculiar effectiveness of this small poem. Lamb is celebrated for prose essays that combine urbane humor, personal reflection, nostalgia, vulnerability, and moral delicacy. His best-known writing often finds meaning in apparently modest occasions: old habits, city scenes, family memories, childhood recollections, and the strange tenderness of ordinary attachments. “Thoughtless Cruelty” shares this attentiveness to the small and overlooked. It does not announce itself with grand rhetoric or spectacular scenery. Instead, it makes an insignificant domestic event morally resonant. This approach is recognizably Lambian. He understands that ethical life is not composed only of dramatic decisions; it is formed in daily gestures, reflexes, entertainments, and acts of notice.

Lamb’s biography also lends a poignant dimension to his interest in gentleness, though the poem should not be reduced to biographical evidence. His life was marked by family instability, financial pressure, and profound personal tragedy, including the devastating crisis in which his sister Mary, during a period of severe mental illness, killed their mother. Lamb spent much of his adult life in a relationship of extraordinary loyalty and mutual dependence with Mary, serving as her guardian while collaborating with her in literary work. Such experiences may help explain why Lamb’s writing so often attends to fragility, forgiveness, suffering, and the burdens imposed by human vulnerability. In “Thoughtless Cruelty,” however, the moral lesson remains lucid rather than anguished. It addresses an early, preventable form of harm: the failure to care before damage is done.

The poem’s imagery becomes most forceful in its final movement, where Lamb rejects the assumption that the size of a creature determines the seriousness of its suffering. “Do not estimate / A creature’s pain by small or great,” the speaker insists. This is the poem’s ethical climax. The command shifts from the particular act of killing a fly to a general principle of moral judgment. Pain is not a matter of visible grandeur. A large animal may command attention because its body, voice, or movements make suffering legible to us; a small insect may not. But the limits of human perception are not limits on the reality of another creature’s experience. The poem recognizes, with remarkable precision, that moral failure often follows from an imbalance between what exists and what we are able or willing to see.

The anatomical vocabulary of “fibres, nerves, and flesh” is striking. It sounds almost clinical beside the earlier images of wings, springtime, birds, and cold night air. This change in diction is deliberate. Lamb moves from imaginative sympathy to embodied evidence. The “greatest being” and the smallest creature share material structures capable of sensation. The statement does not erase differences among forms of life; Lamb acknowledges that the smaller creature’s “frame and structure” may escape observation. But the poem denies that invisibility equals insensibility. The body becomes the ground of kinship. By emphasizing nerves and flesh, Lamb places human beings within, rather than above, the animal world. We are not connected to the fly because it resembles us socially or intellectually; we are connected because vulnerability is bodily.

That bodily argument has affinities with later philosophical reflections on animal suffering. Modern ethical thought has often challenged the idea that intelligence, language, or social usefulness should be prerequisites for moral consideration. Lamb’s poem reaches a related conclusion through common sense, religious humility, and sensory imagination. It does not demand that readers solve every difficult question concerning human use of animals. It does, however, establish a clear threshold: where suffering can be avoided, where no necessity compels violence, and where a creature’s smallness is the only excuse for indifference, cruelty is indefensible. This is a modest claim in form, but a radical one in implication. It asks readers to revise the scale by which they distribute sympathy.

The poem’s emotional impact arises partly from the tension between its calm voice and the finality of the event it describes. Lamb does not indulge in melodrama. The fly is not elaborately personified, and Robert is not transformed into a villain. Yet this restraint makes the poem more unsettling. The speaker’s measured reasoning reveals how little is needed to expose the wrongness of the act. A life has been ended; no need required it; pain cannot be measured by physical size; and the power to kill does not confer the right to do so. The poem’s sadness is therefore quiet but persistent. Readers may recognize in Robert not an alien offender but the ordinary human tendency to dismiss what seems too small to matter.

There is also an implicit critique of amusement in the poem. “Sport,” in this context, names pleasure purchased at the expense of a powerless living thing. Lamb identifies a dangerous moral pattern: the conversion of another’s vulnerability into one’s own entertainment. This pattern is not confined to the killing of insects. It can appear whenever power is exercised casually, whenever pain becomes spectacle, or whenever the powerful presume that the weak exist for their use. The poem’s domestic scene thus possesses a broader social resonance. Its concern with the fly is genuine and immediate, but its lesson reaches toward relations among people as well. Compassion toward creatures unable to defend themselves becomes a test of one’s capacity for justice more generally.

At the same time, Lamb’s poem avoids reducing compassion to sentimentality. Its moral force depends on distinctions. The bird’s need is not Robert’s sport; Providence is not human whim; a short life is not a valueless life; limited visibility is not the absence of feeling. Such distinctions show that the poem is more intellectually rigorous than its simplicity might initially suggest. It calls not for indiscriminate emotion but for morally attentive judgment. The speaker wants Robert to think, to recognize causes, motives, and consequences. The title’s “thoughtless” therefore means more than careless: it indicates an ethical failure of understanding. To become compassionate is to become perceptive, discriminating, and responsible.

“Thoughtless Cruelty” endures because it makes a large moral question intimate enough to be felt. Its fly is not a decorative symbol detached from real life; it is a creature whose vulnerability presses upon the reader precisely because it is easy to overlook. Lamb’s poem invites a reformation of attention. It asks us to pause before treating any life as negligible, to recognize that power often operates in small gestures, and to understand sympathy as a discipline of imagination. The poem’s voice remains memorable for its mixture of firmness and tenderness. It rebukes Robert, but it also believes Robert can learn. That faith in moral growth is one of the poem’s deepest consolations. Poetry here becomes an instrument of humane perception: it makes the nearly invisible visible, gives ethical gravity to the apparently trivial, and teaches that even the smallest life can summon the largest claims upon the heart.