We shall realise this better if we consider a love from which these
three characteristics have, as far as possible, been abstracted--a love
which professes frankly to rest upon its own attractions, and which
repudiates all such epithets as worse or better. This will at once show
us not only of what various developments the passion of love is capable,
but also how false it is to imagine that the highest kind need naturally
be the most attractive.

I have quoted Othello, and Mrs. Craven's heroine as types of love when
religionized. We will go to the modern Parisian school for the type of
love when de-religionized--a school which, starting from the same
premisses as do the positive moralists, yet come to a practical teaching
that is singularly different. And let us remember that just as the ideal
we have been considering already, is the ideal most ardently looked to
by one part of the world, so is the ideal we are going to consider now,
looked to with an equal ardour by another part of the world. The writer
in particular from whom I am about to quote has been one of the most
popular of all modern romancers; and has been hailed by men of the most
fastidious culture as a preacher to these latter generations of a bolder
and more worthy gospel. '_This_,'[15] says one of the best known of our
living poets, of the work that I select to quote from--

_This is the golden book of spirit and sense,
The holy writ of beauty._

Of this '_holy writ_' the chief theme is love. Let us go on to see how
love is there presented to us.

'_You know_,' says Théophile Gautier's best-known hero, in a letter to a
friend, '_you know the eagerness with which I have sought for physical