We can best understand the real potency of sensual gratification in love, if we consider that those moments which are the subject of our most pleasant memories, are not those in which our desires were gratified, but those in which we ourselves practiced the most ascetic self-denial. Well has Schlegel expressed this sentiment when he says, in his essay upon the Limits of the Beautiful:--"Those who yield their souls captive to the brief intoxication of (sensual) love, if no higher and holier feeling mingle with and consecrate their dreams of bliss, will shrink tremblingly from the pangs which attend their awakening." But nature has here so arranged her course, that after marriage, our children's, or, in their absence, our lovers' affairs, become a part and parcel of our lives, and thus, what began as selfish interest, from the pleasure which we obtain from the presence of our loved one, is transmuted into altruism of the highest type. To those who love, there is nothing of the spirit of boasting in the words of "Valentine," when he says: "She is mine own, And I as rich in having such a jewel As twenty seas, if all their sands were pearls, The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold"; but rather of a pious appreciation of the being who has brought him such great happiness. There is something unaccountable about this passion called love, and anyone who has experienced it does not wonder at the words of Madame de Stael, "Love is the emblem of eternity; it confounds all notions of time, effaces all memory of a beginning, all fear of an end."