Active Gallantry has been sufficiently characterised in the foregoing pages. It is that form of the Desire to Please which readily merges into Self-Sacrifice. A man who would never dream of exposing himself to the slightest danger in his own behalf will, if his sweetheart expresses admiration of a flower growing near a dangerous precipice, rush to pluck it with an audacity which may cost him his life. A fatal case of this sort occurred not long ago on the Hudson River near New York. A man’s life thrown away for the slight æsthetic gratification to be derived by his love from the sight and fragrance of a flower! How frequently, again, do lovers sacrifice their family bonds, the love of parents and relatives, as well as rank and fortune, for the sake of the romantic passion! A mother willingly dies in defence of her offspring’s life. But will she, like Romeo, drink the apothecary’s poisonous draught over the corpse of her dead darling? No, herein again Romantic Love is the deepest of the passions. _Feminine Devotion._—Self-Sacrifice is one of the traits of Romantic Love which may remain unaltered and unweakened in conjugal affection. “Those who have traced the course of the wives of the poor,” says Mr. Lecky, “and of many who, though in narrowed circumstances, can hardly be called poor, will probably admit that in no other class do we so often find entire lives spent in daily persistent self-denial, in the patient endurance of countless trials, in the ceaseless and deliberate sacrifice of their own enjoyments to the wellbeing or the prospects of others.” It is in Wagner’s music-dramas that the modern ideal of feminine devotion unto death has found its most stirring embodiment. Elizabeth, having lost her Tannhäuser, thanks to the allurements of Venus, dies of a broken heart; Senta, realising that only by her self-sacrifice can the unhappy Dutchman be released from his terrible doom of eternally sailing the stormy seas until he should find a woman faithful to him unto death, tears herself away from her family and plunges into the ocean. Isolde sings her death-song over the body of Tristan; and Brünnhilde immolates herself on Siegfried’s funeral pyre. Wagner’s theory of the music-drama was a theory of Love in which each lover sacrifices selfish idiosyncrasies in order to produce a happy union in marriage.