“‘Men fall in love, they say, with beauty, with goodness, with gentleness, with intellectual qualities, with a sweet voice, with a smile, with an agreeable manner, with a lovable disposition, with many ascertainable and measurable things, and yet we find them continually falling in love with women who are not beautiful, nor good, nor wise, nor gentle, nor possessing any ascertainable or measurable thing. You’ll find a hundred reasons given for falling in love, or being in love, and rarely the right reason—which is commonly simply because a man cannot help it.... The philosophy of the thing is just here—a woman’s eye glances, or her lips smile, or her neck is white and well turned, or she has a pretty hand, or she flutters a fan gracefully, or she looks sympathetic, or she beckons, or some other trifle as light as gossamer, as valueless as a mote in the sun, as much without significance as the fall of a leaf, and the man is subdued, and immediately he begins to declare that the woman is lovely, when she is not; that she is gentle and good, when anyone can see the shrew in her eye; that she is wise and capable, when she is as perverse as a donkey, and as empty as an abandoned shell on the seashore; and so goes on manufacturing qualities and attributes for her out of air. To satisfy his judgment he creates an ideal, and tries with all his might to persuade himself there are good reasons for his passion—and so there are, but they are not written down in the catalogue of attractions. He is in love because a mysterious force of nature has touched him. The woman may be unbeautiful, heartless, selfish, cruel, untrue, coarse, frivolous, empty, but if the magic of nature—something of the magic, I suspect, that Puck used on the eyes of Titania—touches him, he sees not one of these things in their true aspect. Yes, the Titanias that have fallen in love with men crowned with donkey-heads, and the men that have fallen in love with serpents, thinking them doves, are many—and all because of a diabolism, or a mystic fury in nature that delights in bringing incongruous elements together for the sake of a dance of delirium.’” * * * * * “‘The reason why the world is as bad as it is, is because it has been lectured so much. Denunciation has never improved the morals of the world since the days of Jeremiah to the present hour. Many men are better for reading Emerson—none are better for reading Carlyle; in fact, the influence of your picturesque scold like Carlyle is to make fault-finding look like a virtue, and make people imagine that, if they are only vehement enough in denouncing other people’s sins, they will thereby clear their skirts of their own. It is the vice of a certain kind of piety that it is forever plunged into the deepest concern about other people’s iniquities. Your devout Catholic goes to church to confess his sins; your acrimonious Puritan goes to church to confess other people’s sins.’”