The heart, in its profoundest depths, feels that something is due to Reason; and Reason, in its highest flights, feels that something is due to the heart.
Is there a divine duplicity in the human soul? And yet, after all,
All love seeks is: love. Yet love little knows that
In seeking love, love enters on an endless search. Since
Love is an endless effort to realize the Ideal. For
Love always beckons over insurmountable barriers to uninhabitable realms; promises insupportable possibilities; lures to an unimaginable goal. Yet
Men and women interpret the word differently. Even
Different women interpret the word love differently. Thus,
To one woman, love is as the rising of the sun: it shines but once in her whole life-day; it floods everything with its light; it brightens the world; it dazzles her.
To another woman, love is as the rising of a star: a fresh one may appear every hour of her life, and nor she nor her world is one whit affected by its rays. Indeed, one would hardly err if he said that
Many a woman really does not know whether she is "in love" or not. She is sought--that she perceives; but which of her seekers is worthiest, which most zealous, which merely takes her fancy, and which appeals to her heart--on these matters she meditates long--to the exasperation, of course, of the individual seeker. Accordingly,
Men, carried away by their own passionate impulse, detest calculation of the part of women:
Since HE stakes his all on impulse in the matter of love, says man, why should woman stay to consider? Foolish man! he forgets that
A woman always weighs a man's declaration of love--and legitimately-- and naturally; perhaps legitimately because naturally; for, once again,
What a woman stays to consider in the matter of love is, not the potency of the impulse of the moment, but the permanent efficacy of the emotion. Therefore it is that
Woman unwittingly obeys great Nature's laws.
Many imagine that love is a thing like a chemical element: with a fixed symbol 84 and a rigid atomic equivalent. And so it may be; but, like the philosopher's stone, hitherto it has defied detection in its elemental form. The fact is probably that
Love may be compared to a substance that is never found free, and which not only combines in all sorts of relationships with all sorts of substances, but also, like many another chemical body, takes on the most varied forms, not only in these relationships, but also under varying pressures and temperatures.--Or perhaps it would be better to say that