should not read of troubled or ecstatic lovers in the poems of the ancient writers, who, while knowing love only as selfish lust, nevertheless had sufficient imagination to suffer the agonies of thwarted purpose and the delights of realized hopes.  As a boat-load of shipwrecked sailors, hungry and thirsty, may be switched from deadly despair to frantic joy by the approach of a rescuing vessel, so may a man change his moods who is swayed by what is, next to hunger and thirst, the most powerful and imperious of all appetites.  We must not, therefore, make the reckless assumption that the Greek and Sanscrit writers must have known romantic love, because they describe men and women as being prostrated or elated by strong passion.  When Euripides speaks of love as being both delectable and painful; when Sappho and Theocritus note the pallor, the loss of sleep, the fears and tears of lovers; when Achilles Tatius makes his lover exclaim, at sight of Leucippe:  “I was overwhelmed by conflicting feelings:  admiration, astonishment, agitation, shame, assurance;” when King Pururavas, in the Hindoo drama, Urvasi is tormented by doubts as to whether his love is reciprocated by the celestial Bayadere (apsara); when, in Malati, a love-glance is said to be “anointed with nectar and poison;” when the arrows of the Hindoo gods of love are called hard, though made of flowers; burning, though not in contact with the skin; voluptuous, though piercing—­when we come across such symptoms and fancies we have no right as yet to infer the existence of romantic love; for all these things also characterize sensual passion, which is love only in the sense of self-love, whereas, romantic love is affection for another—­a distinction which will be made more and more manifest as we proceed in our discussion of the ingredients of love, especially the last seven, which are altruistic.  It is only when we find these altruistic ingredients associated with the hopes and fears and mixed moods that we can speak of romantic love.  The symptoms referred to in this paragraph tell us about selfish longings, selfish pleasures and selfish pains, but nothing whatever about affection for the person who is so eagerly coveted.

VI.  HYPERBOLE

As long as love was supposed to be an uncompounded emotion and no distinction was made between appetite and sentiment—­that is between the selfish desire of eroticism and the self-sacrificing ardor of altruistic affection—­it was natural enough that the opinion should have prevailed that love has been always and everywhere the same, inasmuch as several of the traits which characterize the modern passion—­stubborn preference for an individual, a desire for exclusive possession, jealousy toward rivals, coy resistance and the resulting mixed moods of doubt and hope—­were apparently in existence in earlier and lower stages of human development.  We have now seen, however, that these indications