Of course such a poem can have only two stanzas, and these must closely parallel each other in every part. The resulting definition of love, making it the completed form of mutuality, would run as follows: love is the joint service of a common life. (2) Is the lover, then, an unselfish person and does altruism, here reaching its highest pitch, exclude all egoistic regard? On the contrary, it includes and magnifies it. I have said that love always involves liking, the knowledge that an object has brought me gain and is capable of bringing more. In his loved one the lover knows a source of incomparable joy. Were his lady once his, it would matter little what else might happen. Never before has he conceived a good so great, and he knows that hardships shared with her would be better than the most favorable fortune alone. He is therefore an eager seeker. Such a passion to possess is seen in no one else. Yet the opposite may be said with equal truth. He has lost all selfishness. No one is so generous as he, so ready for self-sacrifice. To please and benefit the loved one is all his care. Let what he gives have cost him little, and he is dissatisfied. He longs to suffer for her sake. These are not marks of self-seeking. But they do indicate that the lover has reached a new conception of self, for which he is even more ardent than ever he was for the old. That old separate self he now despises, and knows that only as he loses it in the loved one will he have any worth. Until he has thoroughly cut himself off from his own detached interests he will be unworthy of her. A scrap of Persian verse, translated by Bronson Alcott, states the matter well: “One knocked at the beloved’s door, and a voice asked from within, ‘Who is there?’ And he answered, ‘It is I.’ Then the voice said, ‘This room will not hold me and thee’; and the door was not opened. Then went the lover into the desert, and fasted and prayed in solitude. And after a year he returned and knocked again at the door. And again the voice asked, ‘Who is there?’ And he said, ‘It is thyself.’ And the door was opened to him.” In the mutuality of love egoism and altruism are reconciled. Each of the lovers acquires a new apprehension of self, which conjunct being bears in the mind of each the name of the beloved.