in their independence rise up in the individual soul to the level of this infinite mode, namely personal _honour, love_, and _fidelity._ They are not so much moral qualities and virtues as simply modes which inform the intimate presence of the individual soul when fulfilled with its own self-relation as such is recognized by romance. For the personal self-subsistency for which _honour_ contends does not assert itself as intrepitude on behalf of a communal weal, and the repute of thoroughness in relation to it and integrity of private life. On the contrary it contends simply for the recognition and formal inviolability of the individual person. The same principle applies to _love_, which forms the central subject-matter of this sphere. It is merely the adventitious passion of one individual for another; and however much it may expand under the wand of imagination or may be deepened by excess of emotion, it is for all that neither the ethical relation of marriage or family. _Fidelity_ possesses no doubt more the appearance of a moral character, inasmuch as it does not merely will its own but holds fast to something higher, something shared with itself, surrenders itself to another's will, whether it be the wish or behest of a master, and thereby renounces the personal desire and independence of its own particular volition. But the feeling of loyalty does not concern the objective interest of the social weal in its independent form, that is, in the concrete freedom of the developed state life, but associates itself merely with the _person_ of a master, who, in his own fashion, acts with independence, or concentrates himself in more general relations and is active on their behalf[244]. These three modes of feeling taken together and as they reciprocally affect one another constitute with the exception of the religious relation, which also has its part to play here, the principal content of _chivalry_, and furnish the necessary steps of advance from the principle of purely religious enthusiasm to the entrance of the individual soul into the concrete social life of the world, in the kingdom of which romantic art now secures a platform on which it can from its own resources work out its independence, and at the same time embody a freer type of beauty. It stands here, so to speak, in the free room midway between the absolute content of the independently stable religious conceptions and the varied particularity and restricted boundaries of the finite world. Among the various arts it is pre-eminently poetry which has shown itself most qualified to master such a material, its modes of expression being directed to the life of the soul as wholly occupied with its own domain and as realized in its aims and events.