with which the acquisition of knowledge and the cultivation of
sentiment animates, as with another life of overpowering grace,
the lineaments and the gestures of every form which they inhabit.
Their eyes could not have been deep and intricate from the workings
of the mind, and could have entangled no heart in soul-enwoven
labyrinths.

Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were deprived of
its legitimate object, they were incapable of sentimental love; and
that this passion is the mere child of chivalry and the literature of
modern times. This object or its archetype for ever exists in the
mind, which selects among those who resemble it that which most
resembles it; and instinctively fills up the interstices of the
imperfect image, in the same manner as the imagination moulds and
completes the shapes in clouds, or in the fire, into the resemblances
of whatever form, animal, building, &c., happens to be present to
it. Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain degree
of civilization and refinement ever produces the want of sympathies
still more intimate and complete; and the gratification of the
senses is no longer all that is sought in sexual connexion. It
soon becomes a very small part of that profound and complicated
sentiment, which we call love, which is rather the universal thirst
for a communion not only of the senses, but of our whole nature,
intellectual, imaginative and sensitive, and which, when individualized,
becomes an imperious necessity, only to be satisfied by the complete
or partial, actual or supposed fulfilment of its claims. This want
grows more powerful in proportion to the development which our
nature receives from civilization, for man never ceases to be a
social being. The sexual impulse, which is only one, and often a
small part of those claims, serves, from its obvious and external