The difficulty may, I think, be met by remembering the extraordinary
character of the mental phenomena which manifest themselves in the time of
passion. There is during that time a strange illusion, an illusion so
wonderful that it has engaged the attention of great philosophers for
thousands of years; Plato, you know, tried to explain it in a very famous
theory. I mean the illusion that seems to charm, or rather, actually does
charm the senses of a man at a certain time. To his eye a certain face has
suddenly become the most beautiful object in the world. To his ears the
accents of one voice become the sweetest of all music. Reason has nothing
to do with this, and reason has no power against the enchantment. Out of
Nature's mystery, somehow or other, this strange magic suddenly
illuminates the senses of a man; then vanishes again, as noiselessly as it
came. It is a very ghostly thing, and can not be explained by any theory
not of a very ghostly kind. Even Herbert Spencer has devoted his reasoning
to a new theory about it. I need not go further in this particular than to
tell you that in a certain way passion is now thought to have something to
do with other lives than the present; in short, it is a kind of organic
memory of relations that existed in thousands and tens of thousands of
former states of being. Right or wrong though the theories may be, this
mysterious moment of love, the period of this illusion, is properly the
subject of high poetry, simply because it is the most beautiful and the
most wonderful experience of a human life. And why?

Because in the brief time of such passion the very highest and finest
emotions of which human nature is capable are brought into play. In that
time more than at any other hour in life do men become unselfish,
unselfish at least toward one human being. Not only unselfishness but
self-sacrifice is a desire peculiar to the period. The young man in love
is not merely willing to give away everything that he possesses to the