upon more than one; but what it does when it so concentrates itself
is not to make an alliance of "attack and defence" with the person
it loves, but to flow outwards, through them and beyond them,
until it includes every living thing. Let it not, however, be for a
moment supposed that the emotion of love resembles that vague
"emotion of humanity" which is able to satisfy itself in its own
remote sensationalism without any contact with the baffling and
difficult mystery of real flesh and blood.

The emotion of love holds firmly and tightly to the pieces and
fragments of humanity which destiny has thrown in its way. It
does not ask that these should be different from what they are,
except in so far as love inevitably makes them different. It accepts
them as its "universe," even as it accepts, without ascetic dismay,
the weakness of the particular "form of humanity" in which it
finds _itself_ "incarnated."

By gradual degrees it subdues these weaknesses of the flesh,
whether in its own "form" or in the "form" of others; but it is quite
contrary to the emotion of love to react against such weaknesses of
the flesh with austere or cruel contempt. It is humorously
indulgent to them in the form of its own individual "incarnation"
and it is tenderly indulgent to them in the form of the "incarnation"
of other souls.

The emotion of love does not shrink back into itself because in the
confused pell-mell of human life the alien souls which destiny has
chosen for its companions do not satisfy, in this detail or the other
detail, the desire of its heart. The emotion of love is always
centrifugal, always outflowing. It concentrates itself upon this
person or the other person, as the unaccountable attractions of
likeness and difference dictate or as destiny dictates; but the
deepest loyalty of love is always directed to the eternal vision; for
in the eternal vision it not only becomes one with all living souls
but it also becomes one--though this is a high and difficult
mystery--with all the dead that have ever loved and with all the
unborn that will ever love. For the apprehension of the eternal
vision is at once the supreme creation and the supreme discovery
of the soul of man; and not of the soul of man alone, but of all
souls, whether of beasts or plants or demi-gods or gods, who fill
the unfathomable circle of space.

The secret of this kind of love, when it comes to the matter of
human relationships, may perhaps best be ex