It is their constant and unexpected changes from joy to sadness, from tears to smiles, that constitute the greatest charm of Heine and Chopin and make them the lyric poet and musician _par excellence_ for lovers. Either a gladsome rainbow suddenly appears to illumine their lurid landscape; or, again, “their plenteous joys, wanton in fulness, seek to hide themselves in drops of sorrow.” Even the famous “For ought that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth”— what is it but another way of stating that that Love which has met with no impediments, in which anguish and delight have not warmed one another by mutual friction, has never broken out into a conflagration sufficiently brilliant to be recorded “by tale or history” as a remarkable specimen of “true love.” It is the plot-interest that fascinates the reader as well as the lover himself; it is the impediments and emotional conflicts, the _coyness of fate_, that constitute the principal charm in a tale of love; and it would take a very clever novelist to attract readers by an account of a courtship of which the happy result was a foregone conclusion at every stage. Thus the magic effect of contrasted emotions suggests why pleasure alternating with woe in Love is more intense than pleasure uninterrupted. A mountaineer who has been wading through snowfields all day up to his knees enjoys the comforts of his slippers, a bright fire, and a cup of tea in the evening, twice as much as a man who has been all day at home. On reflection, however, it seems as if Contrast, far from reducing things to their first principles, itself needed an explanation. _Why_ is it that by contrasting two emotions we heighten their colour? A partial explanation was, indeed, suggested in speaking of discords: anguish begets desire, and the more intense desire has been, the more lively is its gratification. A more profound solution of the problem, however, is found in the fact that feelings have their _echoes_, which continue sometimes long after the original tone has ceased; and if meantime a new tone is sounded, it blends with the echo and produces a mixed feeling. The sense of Temperature affords a simple illustration of this “echo.” Place two basins before you, one filled with tepid, the other with ice-cold, water. Put your right hand in the ice-water one minute, leaving the left in your pocket. Then put both hands into the tepid water. It will seem still tepid to the left, but quite warm to the right hand. Some psychologists, however, deny that pleasures and pains ever coalesce into one feeling—that there is such a thing as a mixed feeling. They contend that the attention can be fixed on only one feeling at a time, that the stronger crowds out the weaker, and that it is only their rapid succession that makes two feelings appear simultaneous, just as a firebrand swung around rapidly _seems_ to form a fiery circle.