than hunger is either wrong or noble--and the
delight in being loved, to be devoid of which a man must be lost in
an immeasurably deeper, in an evil, ruinous, yea, a fiendish
selfishness. Not to care for love is the still worse reaction from
the self-foiled and outworn greed of love. Gibbie's love was a
diamond among gem-loves. There are men whose love to a friend is
less selfish than their love to the dearest woman; but Gibbie's was
not a love to be less divine towards a woman than towards a man.
One man's love is as different from another's as the one is himself
different from the other. The love that dwells in one man is an
angel, the love in another is a bird, that in another a hog. Some
would count worthless the love of a man who loved everybody. There
would be no distinction in being loved by such a man!--and
distinction, as a guarantee of their own great worth, is what such
seek. There are women who desire to be the sole object of a man's
affection, and are all their lives devoured by unlawful jealousies.
A love that had never gone forth upon human being but themselves,
would be to them the treasure to sell all that they might buy. And
the man who brought such a love might in truth be all-absorbed
therein himself: the poorest of creatures may well be absorbed in
the poorest of loves. A heart has to be taught to love, and its
first lesson, however well learnt, no more makes it perfect in love,
than the A B C makes a savant. The man who loves most will love
best. The man who throughly loves God and his neighbour is the only
man who will love a woman ideally--who can love her with the love
God thought of between them when he made man male and female. The
man, I repeat, who loves God with his very life, and his neighbour
as Christ loves him, is the man who alone is capable of grand,
perfect, glorious love to any woman. Because Gibbie's love was
towards everything human, he was able to love Ginevra as Donal, poet
and prophet, was not yet grown able to love her. To that of the
most passionate of unbelieving lovers, Gibbie's love was as the fire
of a sun to that of a forest. The fulness of a world of love-ways
and love-thoughts was Gibbie's. In sweet affairs of
loving-kindness, he was in his own kingdom, and sat upon its throne.
And it was this essential love, acknowledging and embracing, as a
necessity of its being, everything that could be loved, which now
concentrated its rays on the individual's in