e guillotine was attending.

There love touched bottom. It could not go lower. But though it could and
did remount it did not afterward reach higher altitudes than those to
which it had previously ascended. In the eighteenth century the possible
situations of its infinite variety were, at least temporarily, exhausted.
Thereafter the frailties of great ladies, the obscurer liaisons of lesser
ones, attachments perfect and imperfect, loves immaculate and the reverse,
however amply set forth, disclose no new height. As the pages of
chronicles turn and faces emerge, lovers appear and vanish. In the various
annals of different lands their amours, pale or fervid as the case may be,
differ perhaps but only in atmosphere and accessories. On antecedent types
no advance is accomplished. Recitals of them cease to enlighten. Love had
become what it has since remained, a harper strumming familiar airs,
strains hackneyed if delicate, melodies very old but always new, so novel
even that they seem original. To the music of it history discloses fresher
mouths, further smiles, tears and kisses. History will always do that.
Wrongly is it said that it repeats itself. Except with love it never
does. In life as in death change is the one thing constant. Between them
love alone stands changeless. Since it first appeared it has had many
costumes, a wardrobe of tissues of every hue. But in character it has not
altered. Influences favorable or prejudicial might degrade it or exalt. In
abasements and assumptions love, like beauty, being one and indivisible,
remained unchangeably love. What varied was the costume.

X

THE LAW OF ATTRACTION

"To renounce your individuality, to see with another's eyes, to hear with
another's ears, to be two and yet but one, to so melt and mingle that you
no longer know are you you or another, to constantly absorb and constantly
radiate, to reduce earth, sea, and sky and all that in them is to a single
being, to give yourself to that being so wholly that nothing whatever is
withheld, to be prepared at any moment for any sacrifice, to double your
personality in bestowing it--that is love."

So Gautier wrote, very beautifully as was his beautiful custom. But in
this instance inexactly. That is not love. It is a description, in gold
ink, of one of love's many costumes. Every poet has provided one. All give
images and none the essence. Yet that essence is the sphinx's riddle. Its
only OEdipus is philosophy.