Source identified1
Image design Linen
Read & copy
“See, how this strange thing, this love of ours, lives and shines out in the unlikeliest of places! You have been in the fields in early morning? Barren acres, all! But only stoop—catch the light thwartwise—and all is a silver network of gossamer! So the fairy filaments of this strange thing underrun and link together the whole world.”
Meaning & context
A sympathetic adult character imagines love as something easy to overlook yet widely connective, using morning gossamer as the image for hidden bonds between people.
Source details
The Golden Age, Project Gutenberg #53250. The passage is spoken by the narrator’s adult friend during a conversation about love; it is literary dialogue inside Grahame’s childhood-remembrance fiction rather than a sociological claim.