e glamour of sex, imagine
they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own ideal.

Nature is both a trickster and a humorist and sets the will of the
species beyond the discernment of the individual. The picador has to
blindfold his horse in order to get him into the bull-ring, and
likewise Dan Cupid exploits the myopic to a purpose.

For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable
Girl clothed in a poet's fancy. Fortunate, indeed, was Dante that he
never knew her well enough to get undeceived, and so walked through life
in love with love, sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and divinely happy in
his melancholy.

* * * * *

There be simple folks and many, who think that the tragedy of love lies
in its being unrequited.

The fact is, the only genuinely unhappy love--the only tragedy--is when
love wears itself out.

Thus tragedy consists in having your illusions shattered.

The love-story of Dante lies in the realm of illusion and represents an
eternal type of affection. It is the love of a poet--a Pygmalion who
loves his own creation. It is the love that is lost, but the things we
lose or give away are the things we keep. That for which we clutch we
lose.

Love like that of Dante still exists everywhere, and will until the end
of time. One-sided loves are classic and know neither age nor place; and
to a degree--let the fact be stated softly and never hereafter be so
much as whispered--all good men and women have at some time loved
one-sidedly, the beloved being as unaware of the love as a star is of
the astronomer who discovers it.

This kind of love, carried on discreetly, is on every hand, warming into
life the divine germs of art, poetry and philosophy. Of it the world
seldom hears. It creates no scandal, never is mentioned in court
proceedings, nor is it featured by the newspapers. Indeed, the love of
Dante would have been written in water, were it not for the fact that
the poet took the world into his confidence, as all poets do--for
literature is only confession.

Many who have written of Dante, like Boccaccio and Rossetti, have shown
as rare a creative ability as some claim Dante revealed in creating his
Beatrice.

"Paint me with the moles on," said Lincoln to the portrait-man. I'll
show Dante with moles, wrinkles and the downward curve of the corners of
his mouth, duly recording the fact that the corners of his mouth did not
turn d