the whole matter?  That would be a conclusion to which I would not willingly come; but it is quite clear that we have transcendentalised the power of love very much of late.  Is this due to the immense flood of romances that have overwhelmed our literature?  Does love really play so large a part in people’s lives as romances would have us think?  Or do the immense number of romances rather show that love does really play a greater part than anything else in our lives?  The transcendental conception of love has found a high and passionate expression in the sonnets of Rossetti, yet all that we know of Rossetti would seem to prove that in his case it was actual rather than transcendental; and he is to be classed in the matter of love rather among its voluptuaries and slaves than among its true and harmonious exponents.  I am disposed to think that with men, at all events, or at least with Englishmen of the present day, love is rather a bewildering episode than a guiding principle; and that some of the happiest alliances have been those in which passion has tranquilly transformed itself into a true and gentle companionship.  This would seem to prove that love was as a rule a physical rather than a spiritual passion, cutting across life rather than flowing in its channels.

And then, too, the further consideration intervenes:  Can any one, in reflecting upon the instances of great and loving relationships that have come within the range of his experience, name a single case in which a deep passion has ever been conceived and consummated, without the existence of physical charm of some kind in the woman who has been the object of the passion?  I do not, of course, limit charm to regular and conventional beauty.  But I cannot myself recall a single instance of such a passion being evoked by a woman destitute of physical attractiveness.  The charm may be that of voice, of glance, of bearing, of gesture, but the desirable element is always there in some form or other.

I have known women of wit, of intellect, of sympathy, of delicate perception, of loyalty, of passionate affectionateness, who yet have missed the joy of wedded love from the absence of physical charm.  Indeed, to make love beautiful, one has to conceive of it as exhibited in creatures of youth and grace like Romeo and Juliet; and to connect the pretty endearments of love with awkward, ugly, ungainly persons has something grotesque and even profane about it.  But if love were the transcendental thing that it is supposed to be, if it were within reach of every hand, physical characteristics would hardly affect the question.  I wish that some of the passionate interpreters of love would make a work of imagination that should render with verisimilitude the love-affair of two absolutely grotesque and misshapen persons, without any sense of incongruity or absurdity.  I should be loth to say that love depends upon physical characteristics; but I think it must be confessed that impassioned