eally astonishes a man and
startles him out of his prepared opinions. Everything else befalls him
very much as he expected. Event succeeds to event, with an agreeable
variety indeed, but with little that is either startling or intense;
they form together no more than a sort of background, or running
accompaniment to the man's own reflections; and he falls naturally into
a cool, curious, and smiling habit of mind, and builds himself up in a
conception of life which expects to-morrow to be after the pattern of
to-day and yesterday. He may be accustomed to the vagaries of his friend
and acquaintances under the influence of love. He may sometime look
forward to it for himself with an incomprehensible expectation. But it
is a subject in which neither intuition nor the behaviour of others will
help the philosopher to the truth. There is probably nothing rightly
thought or rightly written on this matter of love that is not a piece of
the person's experience.

*****

It is the property of things seen for the first time, or for the first
time after long, like the flowers in spring, to re-awaken in us the
sharp edge of sense, and that impression of mystic strangeness which
otherwise passes out of life with the coming years; but the sight of a
loved face is what renews a man's character from the fountain upwards.

*****

Nothing is given for nothing in this world; there can be no true love,
even on your own side, without devotion; devotion is the exercise of
love, by which it grows; but if you will give enough of that, if you
will pay the price in a sufficient 'amount of what you call life,' why
then, indeed, whether with wife or comrade, you may have months and even
years of such easy, natural, pleasurable, and yet improving intercourse
as shall make time a moment and kindness a delight.

*****

Love is not blind, nor yet forgiving. 'O yes, believe me,' as the song
says, 'Love has eyes!' The nearer the intimacy, the more cuttingly do
we feel the unworthiness of those we love; and because you love one, and
would die for that love to-morrow, you have not forgiven, and you never
will forgive that friend's misconduct. If you want a person's faults, go
to those who love him. They will not tell you, but they know. And herein
lies the magnanimous courage of love, that it endures this knowledge
without change.

*****

Certainly, whatever it may be with regard to the world at large, this
idea of beneficent pleasure is true as b