To account for this amorous propensity of Genius is easy enough. Genius means creative power allied with a taste for the Beautiful. This taste may be gratified by the contemplation of the beauties of Nature—the creative power by reproducing them on canvas or manuscript. But Nature’s masterpiece is lovely woman, who not only yields the highest gratification of artistic taste, but inspires Love: and what is Love but a creative impulse—a desire to link one’s name and personality, in future generations, with this embodiment of consummate human beauty? Shakspere’s “Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind,” suggests another reason why men of Genius are eternally involved in Love-affairs. The lover becomes infatuated not with the girl he sees but with the girl he imagines, using her features as a mere sketch to be filled up _ad libitum_— “Such tricks hath strong imagination, That if it would but apprehend some joy, It comprehends some bringer of that joy; Or in the night, imagining some fear, How easy is a bush supposed a bear!” To imagine a feeling is to entertain it; for an imagined impression revives the same cerebral processes that were aroused by the original sense impression. In ordinary minds the remembered image of a girl’s lovely features, the echo of her sweet voice, are much fainter than the original sight and sound; whereas the imagination of genius paints a face and recalls a voice as vividly as if they were present: so that here _to think of Love is to be in Love_—_pro tempore_. Besides his refined taste and vivid imagination—which retouches every defective negative—it is the natural depth of his emotions that urges a Genius to fall in Love with every lovely woman. Passions are like dogs: the big ones need more food than the little ones. A peasant cannot experience the subtle and multitudinous emotions that fill the heart of an artist, a statesman, a scientific discoverer; much less the complex group of ethereal emotions that make up Romantic Love. The higher we rise in the intellectual scale, the more varied, complex, and deep are the emotional groups which delight and torment the soul. As Genius represents the climax of intellectual power, Love the climax of emotional intensity, is it wonderful that there should be an affinity between the two? The higher a mountain peak the more does it attract every passing cloud and clasp it to its breast—hoping—vainly hoping—to warm a heart chilled by its isolation above the rest of the world.