If you read that title and had flashbacks to high school literature class, rest easy. This is less than one page of Hugo’s 1,400+ page masterpiece.
The following reading is great for lovers of classic literature. It does contain some religion-adjacent language (namely, comparing the soul to “a divine spark”) but for those seeking a purely secular ceremony, a reference so fleeting doesn’t bother most of my fellow heathens.
I encountered in the street, a very poor young man who was in love. His hat was old, his coat was worn, his elbows were in holes; water trickled through his shoes, and the stars through his soul.
Love partakes of the soul itself. It is of the same nature. Like the soul, it is a divine spark; it is incorruptible, indivisible, imperishable. It is a point of fire within us, which is immortal and infinite, which nothing can limit and nothing can extinguish. We feel it burning even in the marrow of our bones, and we see it radiate even to the depths of the sky.
The future belongs to hearts even more than it does to minds. Love, that is the only thing that can occupy and fill eternity. When love has melted and mingled two beings into a sacred unity, the secret of life is found for them; they are then but the two terms of a single destiny; they are then but the two wings of a single spirit.
