The doctors of self-love are misled by a wrong use of the words,--"We love ourselves!" Now this is impossible for a finite and created being in the absolute meaning of self; and in its secondary and figurative meaning, self signifies only a less degree of distance, a narrowness of moral view, and a determination of value by measurement. Hence the body is in this sense our self, because the sensations have been habitually appropriated to it in too great a proportion; but this is not a necessity of our nature. There is a state possible even in this life, in which we may truly say, "My self loves,"--freely constituting its secondary or objective love in what it wills to love, commands what it wills, and wills what it commands. The difference between self-love, and self that loves, consists in the objects of the former as given to it according to the law of the senses, while the latter determines the objects according to the law in the spirit. The first loves because it must; the second, because it ought; and the result of the first is not in any objective, imaginable, comprehensible, action, but in that action by which it abandoned its power of true agency, and willed its own fall. This is, indeed, a mystery. How can it be otherwise?--For if the will be unconditional, it must be inexplicable, the understanding of a thing being an insight into its conditions and causes. But whatever is in the will is the will, and must therefore be equally inexplicable. In a word, the difference of an unselfish from a selfish love, even in this life, consists in this, that the latter depends on our transferring our present passion or appetite, or rather on our dilating and stretching it out in imagination, as the covetous man does;--while in the former we carry ourselves forward under a very different state from the present, as the young man, who restrains his appetites in respect of his future self as a tranquil and healthy old man. This last requires as great an effort of disinterestedness as, if not a greater than, to give up a present enjoyment to another person who is present to us. The alienation from distance in time and from diversity of circumstance, is greater in the one case than in the other. And let it be remembered, that a Christian may exert all the virtues and virtuous charities of humanity in any state; yea, in the pangs of a wounded conscience, he may feel for the future periods of his own lost spirit, just as Adam for all his posterity. O magical, sympathetic, 'anima! principium hylarchicum! rationes spermaticae!' [Greek: logoi poiaetikoi!] O formidable words! And O man! thou marvellous beast-angel! thou ambitious beggar! How pompously dost thou trick out thy very ignorance with such glorious disguises, that thou mayest seem to hide it in order only to worship it! LIMITATION OF LOVE OF POETRY.