That such mystic emotions, whether in religion or in friendship, are erotic was well known before the day's of Freud. They have always expressed themselves in erotic language. And why should they not be erotic? Sexual passion is itself an incident in the life of the Psyche, a transitive phase in the great cycle by which life on earth is kept going. It grows insensibly out of bodily self-love, childish play, and love of sensation; it merges in the end, after its midsummer night's dream, into parental and kingly purposes. How casual, how comic, the purely erotic impulse is, and how lightly nature plays with it, may be seen in the passion of jealousy. Jealousy is inseparable from sexual love, and yet jealousy is not itself erotic either in quality or in effect, since it poisons pleasure, turns sympathy into suspicion, love into hate, all in the interests of proprietorship. Why should we be jealous, if we were simply merry? Nature weaves with a wide loom, and crosses the threads; and erotic passion may be as easily provoked peripherally by deeper impulses as be itself the root of other propensities. Lovers sometimes pretend at first to be only friends, and friends have sometimes fancied, at first blush, that they were lovers; it is as easy for one habit or sentiment as for the other to prove the radical one, and to prevail in the end. As for Englishmen, the last thing they would do would be to disguise some base prompting in high-flown language; they would call a spade a spade, if there were occasion. They are shy of words, as of all manifestations; and this very shyness, if it proves that there is at bottom a vital instinct concerned, also proves that it is not intrinsically more erotic than social, nor more social than intellectual. It is each of these things potentially, for such faculties are not divided in nature as they are in language; it may turn into any one of them if accident leads it that way; but it reverts from every casual expression to its central seat, which is the felt harmony of life with life, and of life with nature, with everything that in the pulses of this world beats our own measure, and swells the music of our thoughts. 18 DICKENS