BEACON LIGHTS OF HISTORY

HÉLOÏSE.

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A.D. 1101-1164.

LOVE.


When Adam and Eve were expelled from Paradise, they yet found one
flower, wherever they wandered, blooming in perpetual beauty. This
flower represents a great certitude, without which few would be
happy,--subtile, mysterious, inexplicable,--a great boon recognized
alike by poets and moralists, Pagan and Christian; yea, identified not
only with happiness, but human existence, and pertaining to the soul in
its highest aspirations. Allied with the transient and the mortal, even
with the weak and corrupt, it is yet immortal in its nature and lofty in
its aims,--at once a passion, a sentiment, and an inspiration.

To attempt to describe woman without this element of our complex nature,
which constitutes her peculiar fascination, is like trying to act the
tragedy of Hamlet without Hamlet himself,--an absurdity; a picture
without a central figure, a novel without a heroine, a religion without
a sacrifice. My subject is not without its difficulties. The passion or
sentiment I describe is degrading when perverted, as it is exalting when
pure. Yet it is not vice I would paint, but virtue; not weakness, but
strength; not the transient, but the permanent; not the mortal, but the
immortal,--all that is ennobling in the aspiring soul.