What Is Love?

I-ove is, to my mind, nothing but an enthusiastic congeniality of soul. It is a profound sense of a pervasive harmony of being, writes H. H. Boyesen. Its first syraptoms is not a physlcal atiraction, but a delicious realization, on the part of each, of a strange consonance of nature. More than half its Joy consista in the feeling of belng completely understood ín one's noblest potentialities. The lover is for the time what his beloved believes him to be; and she is what he believes her to be. What happy audacity of speech, what glorieus heights of feeling, what rare flashes of insight, as the two chords go sounding together, in melodious embrace, reveling in each other's eloquence, charm, and beauty! To be thus tuned up an octave above one's ordinary self, to feel the resonance of one's speech in a noble woman's soul, to receive one's thought back enriched' and beautified by having passed through her mind, is about the highest beatltude which earth has to offer. And the chances of it will be infinitely multlplied whcn mind and character, in the more exclusive sense, ghall not be the rare attributes of a fow exceptional women. A soul-relati&n can exist only where souls exist and have shed their embryonic swathings, having assumed their permanent type and quality. That by no means precludes growth, but rather insures it, and in a way points ts direction.