Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

E. M. Forster’s injunction “Only connect!” appears in his novel *Howards End* (1910), in a passage associated with Margaret Schlegel’s reflections on the moral and emotional task of modern life. Written in Edwardian England amid rapid social change, the novel stages encounters between different “worlds”—the intellectual, liberal Schlegels; the wealthy, pragmatic Wilcoxes; and the precarious lower-middle-class Basts. Forster frames the era as one of fragmentation (social, spiritual, personal), and the line functions as a kind of credo: a call to reconcile inner life with outward action, and to bridge divides of class, temperament, and value.

The passage urges integration: to “connect the prose and the passion” is to unite the practical, everyday self with the emotional and imaginative self, so that neither becomes sterile. “Live in fragments no longer” criticizes compartmentalization—separating intellect from feeling, private desire from public conduct, or one social sphere from another. The striking pairing of “the beast and the monk” suggests that both ungoverned appetite and isolated asceticism thrive on separation; connection dissolves their extremes by bringing human impulses into relation and proportion. In Forster’s ethical vision, love at its height is not mere sentiment but a disciplined, humane wholeness that resists the modern tendency to split life into incompatible parts.