The influence of love upon the forces and forms of thought is twofold, and is derived from self-love and from the psychical nature of the person loved. Being a sentiment born during youth or rejuvenated during old age, it especially excites the imagination and refines the aptitude for reproducing the beautiful; in a few words, it warms those mental aptitudes that generally reach their climax at the same age when love manifests its greatest energies. Very rarely a man can be a poet or a great artist without having loved intensely, without having had at least a great capacity for loving. Chastity, forced or voluntary, may conceal love; but down in the depths of the heart some images, resembling an angel more than a woman, have sway, rising at every inspiration of genius, at every song of the lyre, at every touch of the brush, and reviving or kindling the sacred fire of art. The genius of many among the greatest poets, artists and writers of the world had love as its first companion and supreme inspirer; and without this sentiment their names might be totally unknown to us. The love that is born in a sublime brain accumulates gigantic forces, and chastity, always imposed by great passions in their first stage, refines and intensifies them; so that love seems to transform into genius, and genius dyes with splendid hues every amorous manifestation. A chaste genius which loves is a legion of fighting forces, a whole host of winged geniuses, and therefore no difficult question, no irresistible force can oppose it. Thought, when the companion of love, offers to it the richest tributes of its energy, just as the enamored bird sings its most harmonious notes for its companion, the flower condenses all its perfumes and the fascination of its most beautiful colors around the nest in which plants love. And with thought, intensified, transformed, adorned with all its splendors, goes the stimulus of self-esteem, which in the satisfaction of pride of the person loved finds always new incitement and new incentive to work. Nor does the creature loved receive only the tribute, but from the enthusiastic eloquence with which gratitude is expressed by that creature, it is manifest that the latter also feels the same inciting influence, and the most modest and stillest tongue finds splendors of form and savoriness of style unknown to that day.