ys unattainable, an illusion. Every earthly love, even if it finds
no response at all, may, in principle, be gratified, and is only unhappy
if external circumstances intervene. But the love of the Madonna is in
itself fraught with the tragic impossibility of requital; its foundation
is the recognition, or divination, of the fact that mortal women are too
insignificant for a passion which yearns for infinitude. A lover filled
with the longing to glorify a woman and worship her as a divine being,
has frequently experienced a certain disappointment. The beloved may
have died young--as did Beatrice--without his ever having come into
close contact with her; instinctively his soul turns heavenward--and
imagination has ample scope to transform and transfigure the dead. Or he
may have been disappointed in his mistress; it may have been that he,
attuned to pure, spiritual love, has found her all too human. He flees
from reality into the world of dreams, and envelops her with the veil of
mysteriousness and divinity. Purely spiritual love is an intense
emotion, and as men and women of flesh and blood cannot always live at
high pressure, hours of dejection and disappointment will necessarily
have to be experienced. The soul takes refuge in an illusion which
becomes more and more an end in itself, and gradually the lover creates
an inaccessibly lofty, celestial woman. For purely spiritual love
aspires to absolute transcendency; it cannot bear contact with every-day
life. The psychologists of the present day tell us that a feeling, in
becoming spiritualised, loses strength,--history teaches us that in the
case of great souls the opposite is the rule.

These suggestions purpose to explain the inception of an ecstatic love;
but the true metaphysical erotic is born and needs no outside stimulus;
his heart yearns for the inaccessible from the very beginning. There are
certain elements of feeling which must be present in his soul
simultaneously: a religious elementary feeling tending to the
metaphysical; the need of a sacred--a divine--being, as the foundation
of all existing things; a powerful and purely spiritual craving for
love, hurt, perhaps unconsciously, in early youth, and finally an
imagination endowed with plastic force--artistic tendencies. In the case
of the mystic the soul, too, is filled with the consciousness of the
divine; he, too, has the capacity for a great love, but with him it is
not the love of woman, but of something