. If the ideal is
meantime so sadly caricatured, the fault lies with the circumstances of
life that have not allowed the sane will adequate exercise. Lack of
strength and of opportunity makes it impossible for man to preserve all
his interests in a just harmony; and his conscious ideal, springing up
as it too often does in protest against suffering and tyranny, has not
scope and range enough to include the actual opportunities for action.
Nature herself, by making a slave of the body, has thus made a tyrant of
the soul.

[Sidenote: Their light all focussed on the object of love.]

Fairy-land and a mystical heaven contain many other factors besides that
furnished by unsatisfied and objectless love. All sensuous and verbal
images may breed after their own kind in an empty brain; but these
fantasies are often supported and directed by sexual longings and
vaguely luxurious thoughts. An Oriental Paradise, with its delicate but
mindless aestheticism, is above everything a garden for love. To brood
on such an Elysium is a likely prelude and fertile preparation for
romantic passion. When the passion takes form it calls fancy back from
its loose reveries and fixes it upon a single object. Then the ideal
seems at last to have been brought down to earth. Its embodiment has
been discovered amongst the children of men. Imagination narrows her
range. Instead of all sorts of flatteries to sense and improbable
delicious adventures, the lover imagines but a single joy: to be master
of his love in body and soul. Jealousy pursues him. Even if he dreads no
physical betrayal, he suffers from terror and morbid sensitiveness at
every hint of mental estrangement.

[Sidenote: Three environments for love.]

This attachment is often the more absorbing the more unaccountable it
seems; and as in hypnotism the subject is dead to all influences but
that of the operator, so in love the heart surrenders itself entirely to
the one being that has known how to touch it. That being is not
selected; it is recognised and obeyed. Pre-arranged reactions in the
system respond to whatever stimulus, at a propitious moment, happens to
break through and arouse them pervasively. Nature has opened various
avenues to that passion in whose successful operation she has so much at
stake. Sometimes the magic influence asserts itself suddenly, sometimes
gently and unawares. One approach, which in poetry has usurped more
than its share of attention, is through beauty; a