aphrodisiacal virtues of the various silken fabrics, of the various smiles, and of the sensual movements of the body. To these basest studies we have lowered the woman who would so gladly have wished to soar aloft with us through the numberless spheres of the beautiful and not only embrace the world of exterior forms, but also the infinite worlds of sentiment and thought. You will tell me, perhaps, that I aspire to an ideal love, impossible, therefore, to reach; you will tell me that a man with a good constitution can be handsome for forty years of his life, and that woman, too, is entitled to thirty years of beauty and ten more years of gracefulness; so that a love which should last but these thirty or forty years would still be a most beautiful and most enviable thing. A spring and a summer of forty years, ending with a mild autumn, in which a sweet remembrance, a suave reciprocal gratitude, and an intimate friendship prepare the last twilight of old age, may seem to us a worthy triumph of a long and splendid life of love. And I am with you if you mean the common loves of the common people; but we must have a high, a very high aim, and we all should desire a love lasting as long as life and which shall be buried alone in its grave. And then every healthy man can offer to woman the thyrsus of love, and every healthy woman can offer the cup of voluptuousness to man; but how many men are handsome, how many women can be called beautiful? Perhaps not ten in a hundred; and all the others who in various degrees are removed from the type of perfection of form, shall they not love, can they not be loved? Certainly.