Love is, on the contrary, at perpetual war with egotism; and although the latter is a gigantic affection, yet it pales before the brilliant light of the Titan of the Affections. Many animals prefer death to abandoning the faithful companion. Even the toad suffers himself to be tortured, burned, to have his limbs amputated, his eyes gouged; but as long as he has one limb intact, he uses it to embrace the female in an amorous clasp. And do we not, too, offer as holocaust to love wealth, glory, science? Does not woman offer to love the long illness of gestation, the tortures of childbirth, the pains of nursing, the anxious cares of domestic and educational struggles? And how many think, in the intoxication of love, of the bitterness and the thorns which they are sowing in that moment; the history of sorrow which, perhaps, by an inexorable law, they are preparing for themselves? Even the most perfect egotist, if he be a healthy man, desires and loves a woman. Apart from a few elect creatures to whom the supreme joys of the creations of thought are permitted, love represents the greatest of energies, the crowning of every edifice. We may thirst for wealth and glory as the greatest of joys, but in the background we behold the outline of a feminine creature at whose feet the trophies of victory must be laid. I do not speak of woman, because, for her, every satisfied vanity, every hoped for glory, all riches desired, every flower and every fruit of the garden of life must be laid at the feet of somebody, and this somebody is always a man. The fireworks with which every festivity of life ends must always be a woman; at the bottom of every vulgar revelry and on the horizon of every sublime glory there is ever an Eve. To love and to be loved is of all human things the best; and even in the world of the suprasensible, the religions of every country have always promised to the good and the believer an eternity of love in the harem of voluptuousness, or in a mystic but amorous ecstasy. Read the burning pages of the mystic writers, and you will be able to tell me if all that fantastic world is not, too, a transubstantiation of love. The gods of every Olympus also have a sexual form, and there are feminine forms for the males and masculine forms for the females. From the cradle to the grave, love is for all and always the highest promise. Between the automatic lust of adolescence and the studied and covetous lecheries of old age, we pass, through the feverish hysteria of early youth, to the deep passions of virility; but for every age love is the sweetest joy. The tocsin of old age begins to sound when, with the first white hairs, we fear that we are no longer able to love; and every one ardently, anxiously hopes that the hour, the minute will never come for him in which he shall be compelled to say the tremendous words: "I cannot."