Poetic Fictitiousness, of course, is a trait which does no one any harm, and often enriches literature with charming fancies. And as for the two remaining characters of genius-Love—Ardour and Precocity—it is evident that there cannot be too much of them in the world. The dawn of Love is always the dawn of so much refinement of the soul, the awakening of so much ambition, that it cannot be too precocious; and the more ardent it is the more thoroughgoing will be its results. Nor need a big fire go out sooner than a small one, provided there is a constant supply of fresh fuel—a point which Balzac has discussed with much eloquence in his _Physiologie du Mariage_. Coleridge says “It is the business of virtue to give a feeling and a passion to our purer intellect, and to intellectualise our feelings and passions.” Now this is precisely what is done by Romantic Love, which first originated in the minds of men of genius. “The might of one fair face sublimes my love, For it hath weaned my heart from low desires.” “Sublimes my love.” These three words of Michael Angelo contain the whole philosophy of our subject. And what is it that sublimes Love chiefly? “The might of one fair face”—the magic effect of Personal Beauty. Perhaps, after all, the greatest difference between the Love of a genius and an ordinary mortal is that in the former the æsthetic element—the Admiration of Beauty—is so much stronger, making up two-thirds of the whole passion. And as a taste for the beautiful in art and nature becomes more common, the Love of common mortals, in approaching that of genius, will more and more partake of this æsthetic refinement—this worship of Personal Beauty for the sake of the higher gratifications it yields to the imagination. INSANITY AND LOVE ANALOGIES The poets, who have in all ages insisted on the analogies between genius and insanity, have also long since discovered a general resemblance between Love and Insanity. Indeed, the notion that Love is a sort of madness is as old as Plato. Love, as understood by him—that is, man’s “worship of youthful masculine beauty”—is, he says, mad, irrational, superseding reason and prudence in the individual mind. And the Stoics, who regarded all affections as maladies, looked upon the severest of the passions as a grave mental disease. Modern poetry is full of allusions to the fatuous folly of Love. Thus Thomson— “A lover is the very fool of nature.” Shakspere— “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact.” “Thou blind fool, Love, what dost thou to mine eyes, That they behold and see not what they see?”