s; when he cannot feel his
right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than
to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say so
because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It
is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself
and can never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient
writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here
on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its
own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light
of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of
this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity
sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of
beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and
fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to
her and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and
intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of
that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was
gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but
sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise which beauty holds out;
but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions which beauty
makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body and falls to admire
strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their
discourses and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of
beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by this love
extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by
shining on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation
with that which is in itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just,
the lover comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker
apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them in one to loving
them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through
which he enters to the society of all true and pure souls. In the
particular society of his mate he attains a clearer sight of any spot,
any taint which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is
able to point it out, and this with mutual jo