I am writing in these pages a modest essay of general physiology, or, as it is usually termed, psychology, and have neither the right nor the strength to undertake the work of literary critic, which still remains to be done, notwithstanding the very beautiful things written by many upon the influence of love in art. Not only has every poet and every artist (and I consider the writer the greatest of all) left in his works the imprint of his loves, but he has felt and interpreted love in a way entirely his own, and which in some cases became the style of a school or an epoch. The woman loved by Byron is quite different from the woman loved by Burns; Laura is not Beatrice, and the woman dimly discerned by Leopardi is not Vittoria Colonna. To study the influences of the times and the mind over the particular mouldings of the loves of great men--in a few words, to draw the comparative psychology of celebrated loves and of the amorous types of art--is a gigantic labor, in which the artist, the psychologist and the literary man should join hands in order to produce a work worthy of the subject. For me it will suffice to have prepared in the present essay some materials for this work of the future. Love ceases to be an impulse for thought and becomes its first assassin, not only when it is unhappy, but also when it sinks into the mud of lust. Chastity is an almost entirely hygienic question, and here we should mark the place where the hygienic branch shoots out from the great trunk of physiology. No embrace has ever debased thought when voluptuousness was only love; but when lasciviousness is stronger than sentiment and the animal man regrets having given too much of himself to the future, then the individual rebels against the excessive tribute paid to the preservation of the species. Then the animal man is diseased and the moral man has fallen into libertinism. No; nature never punishes him who wisely obeys its laws, and after the sacrifice of love man is as happy and intelligent as before, since, in the blessed languor of a brief repose, nature stills even the pain of weariness. "Lay waste the entire forest of concupiscence, not one tree alone. When you shall have felled every tree, cut every branch, you can then pronounce yourselves free, pure, virtuous," exclaims the Dhammapada, and science utters the same cry, but instead of the word "concupiscence" it writes the more precise term "lust." In our organism every function is so well regulated that we, like the citron, can always bear leaves, flowers and fruits, provided we do not sacrifice the fruit to the flower and do not imitate the monstrous flowers with over-expanded petals or seedless fruits. Wise chastity is the ablest administrator of vital harmonies and energies; love and labor do not oppose each other, as many too exacting or hypercritical moralists are continually repeating with too rigid severity.