On account of this difference love cannot be confined to persons. Seeing a little girl tending her rose-bush and asking her if she likes it, I shall probably receive the indignant reply: “No, I love it.” She means: “I think as much about giving to it as of getting from it.” It would be improper to ask a painter, a scholar, if he likes his work. If he follows it for gain he is untrue to it; he can really succeed only when he loves it, _i.e._, gives himself heartily to it. In many cases, therefore, where profit is abundant, it would be a kind of impiety to speak of liking. I like my mother, I like God. Certainly! None gives ampler ground for liking. But for that very reason my mind should be set on the appropriate outgo in return. However much the patriot may like his country, _i.e._, recognize the opportunities it affords for life, he loves it more. Perhaps in all these cases where impersonal beings are loved we inwardly attribute personality to them and feel that we receive from them as much love as we give. For that is an essential in love: it contemplates mutuality. The loved one looks up to the lover as truly as the lover does to the loved. Each counts himself inferior and only through the other capable of possessing worth. “She is my essence and I leave to be, if I be not through her fair influence,” says Shakespeare’s Valentine; and had love reached its completion, Sylvia would have expressed no less. This double action is characteristic of love, while liking has only a single end. If we will speak accurately, then, we shall acknowledge that the real object loved is neither member of the pair but just this mutuality, the “togetherness,” which blots out regard for any separate self and fills each with passion for the conjunct. “To the desire and pursuit of the whole the name of love is given,” says Plato in the _Symposium_. In his “Clasping of Hands” George Herbert charmingly develops the puzzling reciprocity of love when he tries to comprehend his relation to God: “Lord, thou art mine, and I am thine If mine I am; and thine much more Than I or ought or can be mine. Yet to be thine doth me restore, So that again I now am mine, And with advantage mine the more, Since this being mine brings with it thine, And thou with me dost thee restore. If I without thee would be mine, I neither should be mine nor thine. Lord, I am thine, and thou art mine; So mine thou art that something more I may presume thee mine than thine. For thou didst suffer to restore Not thee, but me, and to be mine, And with advantage mine the more; Since thou in death wast none of thine, Yet then as mine didst me restore. Oh be mine still! Still make me thine! Or rather make no thine and mine!”