If the youth of the North does not feel its soul in harmony with this mood, its life will have lost its springtime—without receiving in exchange a longer summer; for premature warmth has its revenge in life as in nature. To experience fully the peculiar beauty of each season of life is the attribute of a profounder comprehension of life’s meaning—and this truth is not less true because a Juliet was only fourteen. What Shakespeare has revealed in her is not the force of early love, incomparable with any other power; rather does he show the love, instantaneous, fatal, overcoming all obstacles, which—equally powerful at every age—yet shows its force most unmistakably when it drives two human beings to death just at the time when the yet unlived life they have before them makes the thought of death most full of horror. Only such an exception can anticipate in springtime the flowering of summer. It is therefore not from the whole necessity of their nature, but from attaching too much importance to one side of it, that many young people now have the idea that love loses its fire and its purity by waiting until the organism can bear its fruits. Nothing is more certain than that the chastity of perfect love is conditioned towards unity by the will of the soul and the senses. But this chaste will may be found before or after the possibility of its realisation. And love’s chastity may then show itself as well in waiting for complete unity as in altogether renouncing the same. It is true that a young man will not experience the intoxication of love at twenty-five as he experienced it some years earlier. But if he feels it for the first time at about twenty-five, then—according to all the laws of physico-psychical sensations of pleasure—just at the height of his sexual existence, and after years of self-control and labour for happiness, he ought to be able to experience a richer vital intoxication than he would have been capable of in the earlier years of his youth. It is incontestable that premature erotic claims are less the result of the needs of the organism than of the influence of the imagination upon it. Only a new healthiness and beauty in the method of treating erotic questions will gradually refashion the now over-excited imagination, calm erotic curiosity, and strengthen the sense of responsibility towards self and towards the new generation, so that premature sexual life may lose its attraction for the young. All this however concerns only immature youth. When, on the other hand, a pair of lovers have reached the age referred to as that of full maturity, and their complete union can only further their own life-enhancement and that of the race, then they commit a sin against themselves and the race if they do not enter into union.