purpose; the soul which exists only in the other is humble, as all that is noble must ever be in the presence of the Incommensurable--which is Love. Love is the Incommensurable; who has ever said that before, who has ever felt it? In the early folk-songs it has been both said and felt, and Goethe has declared it in the loving and playful manner of the eighteenth century, but in our youngest literature, and not only in that of Germany, it is scarcely ever either said or felt. In its place we have free love, where they take one another on trial and end by settling down for convenience’s sake, after the third or fourth attempt. It is a practical and plebeian method, worthy of the age, but it is not love. What stolid minds and dense souls must they have who need first to take one another on trial! For these thick-skinned ones love is an intellectual partnership, or a partnership of interests; maybe they are two libertines who have come across one another in their search for satisfaction. Of course these forms are the most frequent, but they lie on the boundary between barbarism and decadence and are constantly losing their balance on one side or the other. The love which Paul Heyse saw and described is vitality itself. With him love is the essence of vitality, and as the entire philosophy of life is based on that which one feels to be the spark of vitality, so love is the central point in his philosophy. He always describes love as an extraordinary revelation of accumulated strength and power. Love does not hesitate, does not lead astray, does not diminish; as soon as love appears she makes straight for the beloved object whose presence she discerns amongst thousands the instant that he enters the circle of her atmosphere. No sooner does she find herself in the presence of the beloved, to whom she is thus sympathetically attracted, than she becomes the victim of a peculiar emotion which Heyse has never expressed in words, and which it would be very difficult to describe. It is an ardent yearning, a stretching of oneself like the plant to the sun, silent and not to be averted; all the activities of life concentrate themselves towards this one object, the attainment of which means a hitherto unknown force, while the reverse would mean decay. There is no alternative, it must be either an indescribable salvation, or else extinction. To be susceptible of this kind of love and, with the certainty of one who walks in his sleep, to discover the beloved as the one who is organically sympathetic amid thousands whom we either dislike or who are indifferent to us--is the sure sign of a very high culture and of a rare physical and spiritual purity. Just as the instincts of natural selection are being continually perfected together with more sensitive nerves and soul vibrations, just as the spiritual and sensuous needs attain a higher degree of intensity and importance in measure as they are purified and rendered more personal,