Such is the nature of idealization. Like the Venus of Apelles, in which all known beauties were combined, the ideal is the union of all we prize in all creatures; and the mind that has once felt the irresistible compulsion to create this ideal and to believe in it has become incapable of unreserved love of anything else. The absolute is a jealous god; it is a consuming fire that blasts the affections upon which it feeds. For this reason the soul of Guido, in his sonnet, is mortally wounded by the shaft of that beauty which has awakened a vehement longing for perfection without being able to satisfy it. All things become to the worshipper of the ideal so many signs and symbols of what he seeks; like the votary who, kneeling now before one image and now before another, lets his incense float by all with a certain abstracted impartiality, because his aspiration mounts through them equally to the invisible God they alike represent. Another aspect of the same process is well described by Shakespeare, in whom Italian influences count for much, when he says to the person he has chosen as the object of his idealization:-- "Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts Which I, by lacking, have supposed dead, And there reigns love and all love's loving parts And all those friends which I thought buried. How many a holy and obsequious tear Hath dear religious love stolen from mine eye As interest for the dead, which now appear But things removed, which hidden in thee lie. Thou art the grave where buried love doth live Hung with the trophies of my lovers gone, Who all their parts of me to thee did give: That due of many now is thine alone. Their images I loved I view in thee, And thou, all they, hast all the all of me." We need not, then, waste erudition in trying to prove whether Dante's Beatrice or Guido's Giovanna or any one else who has been the subject of the greater poetry of love, was a symbol or a reality. To poets and philosophers real things are themselves symbols. The child of seven whom Dante saw at the Florentine feast was, if you will, a reality. As such she is profoundly unimportant. To say that Dante loved her then and ever after is another way of saying that she was a symbol to him. That is the way with childish loves. Neither the conscious spell of the senses nor the affinities of taste and character can then be powerful, but the sense of loneliness and the vague need of loving may easily conspire with the innocence of the eyes to fix upon a single image and to make it the imaginary goal of all those instincts which as yet do not know themselves.