rivals and a deeper soil, love can
ripen better in such a constant spirit; it will not waste itself in a
continual patter of little pleasures and illusions. But unless the
passion of it is to die down, it must somehow assert its universality:
what it loses in diversity it must gain in applicability. It must become
a principle of action and an influence colouring everything that is
dreamt of; otherwise it would have lost its dignity and sunk into a dead
memory or a domestic bond.

[Sidenote: Instinctive essence of love.]

True love, it used to be said, is love at first sight. Manners have much
to do with such incidents, and the race which happens to set, at a given
time, the fashion in literature makes its temperament public and
exercises a sort of contagion over all men's fancies. If women are
rarely seen and ordinarily not to be spoken to; if all imagination has
to build upon is a furtive glance or casual motion, people fall in love
at first sight. For they must fall in love somehow, and any stimulus is
enough if none more powerful is forthcoming. When society, on the
contrary, allows constant and easy intercourse between the sexes, a
first impression, if not reinforced, will soon be hidden and obliterated
by others. Acquaintance becomes necessary for love when it is necessary
for memory. But what makes true love is not the information conveyed by
acquaintance, not any circumstantial charms that may be therein
discovered; it is still a deep and dumb instinctive affinity, an
inexplicable emotion seizing the heart, an influence organising the
world, like a luminous crystal, about one magic point. So that although
love seldom springs up suddenly in these days into anything like a
full-blown passion, it is sight, it is presence, that makes in time a
conquest over the heart; for all virtues, sympathies, confidences will
fail to move a man to tenderness and to worship, unless a poignant
effluence from the object envelop him, so that he begins to walk, as it
were, in a dream.

Not to believe in love is a great sign of dulness. There are some people
so indirect and lumbering that they think all real affection must rest
on circumstantial evidence. But a finely constituted being is sensitive
to its deepest affinities. This is precisely what refinement consists
in, that we may feel in things immediate and infinitesimal a sure
premonition of things ultimate and important. Fine senses vibrate at
once to harmonies which it may ta