went up from me to you, and worship is religion, and religion is
sacred. So, my dears, were you, each of you in your turn, sacred in
your shrines. Before each of you in turn I fell down, suddenly, "_Come
corpo morto cadde_." And to each of you in turn I devoted those waking
hours which fancy had hitherto claimed of me. Yet this I do feel free
to say, by leave of you ladies, that calf-love has not the educative
value of the genuine passion. It is blind worship by instinct; it is a
sign of awakening sense, but it is not its awakener. It is a lovely
thing as all quick or burning growth is, but it has little relation
to the soul, and our Northern state is the more gracious that
consummation of it is not feasible. Apart from the very obvious
drawbacks there is one not quite so obvious: I mean the early
exhaustion of imaginative sympathy. Love, indeed, is an affair of
maturity. I don't believe that a man, in this country, can love before
forty or a woman before thirty-five. They may marry before that and
have children; and they will love their children, but very rarely each
other. I am thinking now of love at its highest rating, as that
passion which is able to lift a man to the highest flight of which the
soul is capable here on earth--a flight, mind you, which it may take
without love, as the poet's takes it, or the musician's, but which the
ordinary man's can only take by means of love. Calf-love is wholly a
sex matter, perfectly natural, mostly harmless, and nearly always a
beautiful thing, to be treated tenderly by the wise parent.

In my own case my mother treated it so, with a tact and a reverential
handling which only good women know, and I had it as I had mumps and
measles, badly, with a high temperature and some delirium but with no
aggravation from outside. It ran its course or its courses and left me
sane. One of its effects upon me was that it diverted the mind of my
forensic self from the proceedings or aptitudes of my recondite. I