All those who are well acquainted with humanity, all poets and psychologists, are in agreement respecting the fugitive character of youthful love. For this reason, they advise against marriage concluded during the passion of early youth. This poetry of love at first sight is, according to Gutzkow, the eternal =game of chance= of our young people, in which their health, their life, and their future go to wreck. Another keen observer, Kierkegaard, in his “Diary of a Seducer,” says: “Love has many mysteries, and this first love is also a mystery, if not the greatest. Most men in their ardent passion are as if insane; they become engaged or commit some other stupidity, and in a moment it is all over, and they know once more what it has cost them, what they have lost.” And, finally, a third eminent writer on eroticism, Rétif de la Bretonne, says: “It is a folly of the same kind to trust the constancy of a young man of twenty years of age. At this age it is less a woman that one loves than women; one is intoxicated rather by sensual phenomena than by the individual, however lovable that individual may be.” But to youth love is almost always no more than a beautiful memory, a vanishing paradise. There clings to it something imperishable, which has, however, no binding force. And just as to every man the love of youth appears ideal in character, precisely because it is not subjected to the rude considerations of reality, so also in every subsequent love it is almost always the =first beginnings= only in which true beauty and deep perception are experienced. “A thousand years of tears and pains,” Goethe makes his Stella say, “could not counterpoise the happiness of the first glance, the trembling, the stammering, the approach and the withdrawal, the self-forgetfulness, the first fugitive ardent kiss, and the first gently breathing embrace.”