perfected
offspring of friendship are states of consciousness.

Love, in its high and pure forms, is confined to one object.
Friendship has this advantage, that it may be given to all, however
numerous, whose conduct and qualities of character are fitted to
command it. It is, therefore, less perilous, less exposed to fatal
wreck, more capable of consolations and replacements. Love and
friendship are properly not antagonists, but coadjutors. They
naturally go together where there is adaptedness for them, mutually
quickening and increasing each other. The former should never exist
without the ennobling companionship and clarifying mixture of the
latter. But there are numberless instances in which, while the former
is impossible, or would be wrong, the latter is abundantly capable of
nurture, and would prove a boon of unspeakable solace.

Six immortal names will serve to set in relief the distinction
between that impassioned friendship of man and woman which
constitutes Platonic love, and those forms of ideal love which are
often erroneously confounded with it.

The affection of Petrarch for Laura, after her death, was ideal love.
The love which, in her life, had pervaded his system, then rose,
strained of its carnal elements, and re-appeared in his mind alone,
with the ideal equivalents of all it had before. She became a
heavenly idea exciting emotions in him, instead of an earthly object
productive of sensations; yet a correspondence of all that had been
in the sensations was still seen, purged and eternized, in the
emotions.

The affection for Beatrice which consecrated the soul of Dante was
Platonic love, or a divine friendship. It was free from sensual
ingredients from the first. It was his spirit, ruled by an intense
sympathy, mentally confronting hers, as a live mirror before a live
mirror; creating in his own, in correspondent states of
consciousness, all the entrancing shapes of truth, beauty, and
goodness he saw passing in hers, revealed from God, revealing God,
and clothed with power to redeem the gazer from every thing corrupt.
Dante promised to immortalize Beatrice by dedicating to her such a
strain of love as had never before celebrated a woman. He kept his
promise wonderfully. But the essence of his love was not a new
creation; it was simply an ardent, sexless, worshipping friendship,
that Platonic passion which, wholly cleansed from sense, adored a
beautiful soul as a type of the Divine Beauty, a med