Edward Carpenter has the following to say on this point: "It is a matter of common experience that the unrestrained outlet of the purely physical desire leaves the nature drained of its higher love-forces. * * * There are grounds for believing in the transmutability of the various forms of the passion, and grounds for thinking that the sacrifice of a lower phase may sometimes be the only condition on which a higher and more durable phase can be attained; and that, therefore, restraint (which is absolutely necessary at times) has its compensation. Anyone who has once realized how glorious a thing love is in its essence, and how indestructible, will hardly need to call anything that leads to it a sacrifice; and he is indeed a master of life who, accepting the grosser desires as they come to his body, and not refusing them, knows how to transform them at will into the most rare and fragrant flowers of human emotion * * * Between lovers, then, a kind of hardy temperance is to be recommended--for all reasons, but especially because it lifts their satisfaction and delight in each other out of the regions of ephemeralities (which too often turn into dull indifference and satiety) into the region of more lasting things--one step nearer at any rate to the eternal kingdom. "How intoxicating, indeed, how penetrating--like a most precious wine--is that love which is the sexual transformed by the magic of the will into the emotional and spiritual! And what a loss, on the merest ground of prudence and the economy of pleasure, is the unbridled waste along physical channels! So nothing is so much dreaded between lovers as just this--the vulgarization of love--and this is the rock upon which marriage so often splits. There is a kind of illusion about physical desire similar to that which a child suffers from when, seeing a beautiful flower, it instantly snatches the same and destroys in a few moments the form and fragrance which attracted it. He only gets the full glory who holds back a little, and he only truly possesses who is willing if need be not to possess. * * * It must be remembered, however, that in order for a perfect intimacy between two people their physical endearment must by the nature of the case be free to each other. The physical endearment may not be the object for which they come together; but, if it is denied, its denial will bar any real sense of repose and affiance, and make their mutual association restless, vague, tentative and unsatisfied. I think, from various considerations, that, generally, even without the actual physical sex-act, there is an interchange of vital and ethereal elements--so that it may be said that there is a kind of generation taking place within each of the persons concerned, through their mutual influence on each other, as well as that more specialized generation which consists in the propagation of the race."