of love, sensitive, tender, without much generosity of imagination, sportive, melancholy, and monotonous. Among the Spaniards it is copious in imaginative expression, chivalrous, somewhat casuistical in its discovery and defence of rights and duties, so far as they relate to private affairs of honour; and in this respect also possesses all the richest splendour of enthusiasm. In contrast to this among Frenchmen of more modern times love is more an affair of gallantry with a distinct bias toward vanity, an artificial state of feeling converted to the uses of poetry with a kind of sophistry of the senses often marked with the finest wit, at one time expressing a kind of sensuous enjoyment which is devoid of passion, at another a passion that brings with it no enjoyment, a sublimated condition of feeling and sensibility which feeds upon the maxims of reflection. But I must here break off these general indications which our subject does not permit me now to carry further. (_b_) More closely looked at the secular interest may be treated under two general divisions. We have on the one side secularity as actually organized, such as family life, the tie of citizenship and politics, law, justice, morality, and the rest; and in opposition to this[249] independent and assured existence love springs up in noble and impetuous spirits; this world-religion of hearts, which at one time we find joining hands with religion in every respect, while at another it supersedes it, forgets it, and by constituting itself the single essential, or rather the unique and supreme condition of life, is not only prepared to renounce all else, and to fly for refuge to a desert with the beloved, but proceeds in this extremity of its passion, which we can only exclude from the domain of beauty, to sacrifice all the worth of humanity in a manner at once servile, degrading, and despicable. An example of this we have in "Kätchen von Heilbronn." On account of this cataclysm of life's essential interests the objects of love cannot be realized without _collisions_ in the theatre of the world. For despite of love the general conditions of life make their demand and assert their claims and the despotism of love's passion is unable to maintain itself against them with impunity.