desire that it is altogether absent. Stendhal described the mental side of
the process of tumescence as a crystallization, a process whereby certain
features of the beloved person present points around which the emotions
held in solution in the lover's mind may concentrate and deposit
themselves in dazzling brilliance. This process inevitably tends to take
place around all those features and objects associated with the beloved
person which have most deeply impressed the lover's mind, and the more
sensitive and imaginative and emotional he is the more certainly will such
features and objects crystallize into erotic symbols. "Devotion and love,"
wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, "may be allowed to hallow the garments as well
as the person, for the lover must want fancy who has not a sort of sacred
respect for the glove or slipper of his mistress. He would not confound
them with vulgar things of the same kind." And nearly two centuries
earlier Burton, who had gathered together so much of the ancient lore of
love, clearly asserted the entirely normal character of erotic symbolism.
"Not one of a thousand falls in love," he declares, "but there is some
peculiar part or other which pleaseth most, and inflames him above the
rest.... If he gets any remnant of hers, a busk-point, a feather of her
fan, a shoe-tie, a lace, a ring, a bracelet of hair, he wears it for a
favor on his arm, in his hat, finger, or next his heart; as Laodamia did
by Protesilaus, when he went to war, sit at home with his picture before
her: a garter or a bracelet of hers is more precious than any Saint's
Relique, he lays it up in his casket (O blessed Relique) and every day
will kiss it: if in her presence his eye is never off her, and drink he
will where she drank, if it be possible, in that very place," etc.[9]

Burton's accuracy in describing the ways of lovers in his century
is shown by a passage in Hamilton's _Mémoires de Gramont_. Miss
Price, one of the beauties of Charles II's court, and Dongan were
tenderly attached to each other; when the latter died he left