I need not say that I had twin uncles. They were but
one man to the world; to themselves only were they a veritable two. The
word _twin_ means one of two that once were one. To _twin_ means to
_divide_, they tell me. The opposite action is, of _twain_ to make one.
To me as well as the world, I believe, but for the close individual
contact of all my life with my uncle Edward, the two would have been but
as one man. I hardly know that I felt any richer at first for having two
uncles; it was long before I should have felt much poorer for the loss of
uncle Edmund. Uncle Edward was to me the substance of which uncle Edmund
was the shadow. But at length I learned to love him dearly through
perceiving how dearly my own uncle loved him. I loved the one because he
was what he was, the other because he was not that one. Creative Love
commonly differentiates that it may unite; in the case of my uncles it
seemed only to have divided that it might unite. I am hardly intelligible
to myself; in my mind at least I have got into a bog of confused
metaphysics, out of which it is time I scrambled. What I would say is
this--that what made the world not care there should be two of them, made
the earth a heaven to those two. By their not being one, they were able
to love, and so were one. Like twin planets they revolved around each
other, and in a common orbit around God their sun.
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