oves more than she is
loved must necessarily be the object of tyranny. Durable love is that
which always keeps the forces of two human beings in equilibrium. Now
this equilibrium may be maintained permanently; the one who loves the
more ought to stop at the point of the one who loves the less. And is it
not, after all the sweetest sacrifice that a loving heart can make, that
love should so accommodate itself as to adjust the inequality?

What sentiment of admiration must rise in the soul of a philosopher
on discovering that there is, perhaps, but one single principle in the
world, as there is but one God; and that our ideas and our affections
are subject to the same laws which cause the sun to rise, the flowers to
bloom, the universe to teem with life!

Perhaps, we ought to seek in the metaphysics of love the reasons for the
following proposition, which throws the most vivid light on the question
of honeymoons and of Red-moons:

THEOREM.

Man goes from aversion to love; but if he has begun by loving, and
afterwards comes to feel aversion, he never returns to love.

In certain human organisms the feelings are dwarfed, as the thought may
be in certain sterile imaginations. Thus, just as some minds have the
faculty of comprehending the connections existing between different
things without formal deduction; and as they have the faculty of seizing
upon each formula separately, without combining them, or without
the power of insight, comparison and expression; so in the same way,
different souls may have more or less imperfect ideas of the various
sentiments. Talent in love, as in every other art, consists in the power
of forming a conception combined with the power of carrying it out. The
world is full of people who sing airs, but who omit the _ritornello_,
who have quarters of an idea, as they have quarters of sentiment, but
who can no more co-ordinate the movements of their affections than
of their thoughts. In a word, they are incomplete. Unite a fine
intelligence with a dwarfed intelligence and you precipitate a disaster;
for it is necessary that equilibrium be preserved in everything.

We leave to the philosophers of the boudoir or to the sages of the
back parlor to investigate the thousand ways in which men of different
temperaments, intellects, social positions and fortunes disturb this
equilibrium. Meanwhile we will proceed to examine the last cause for the
setting of t