My true love hath my heart, and I have his,
By just exchange one for the other given.
—­Sidney.

It is the secret sympathy,
The silver link, the silken tie,
Which heart to heart, and mind to mind,
In body and in soul can bind.

          
                                            —­Scott.

To a woman who wishes to be loved truly and permanently, a sympathetic disposition is as essential as modesty, and more essential than beauty.  The author of Love Affairs of Some Famous Men has wittily remarked that “Love at first sight is easy enough; what a girl wants is a man who can love her when he sees her every day.”  That, he might have added, is impossible unless she can enter into another’s joys and sorrows.  Many a spark of love kindled at sight of a pretty face and bright eyes is extinguished after a short acquaintance which reveals a cold and selfish character.  A man feels instinctively that a girl who is not a sympathetic sweetheart will not be a sympathetic wife and mother, so he turns his attention elsewhere.  Selfishness in a man is perhaps a degree less offensive, because competition and the struggle for existence necessarily foster it; yet a man who does not merge his personality in that of his chosen girl is not truly in love, however much he may be infatuated.  There can be sympathy without love, but no love without sympathy.  It is an essential ingredient, an absolute test, of romantic love.

IX.  ADORATION

Silvius, in As You Like It, says that love is “all adoration,” and in Twelfth Night, when Olivia asks:  “How does he love me?” Viola answers:  “With adorations.”  Romeo asks:  “What shall I swear by?” and Juliet replies: 

                   Do not swear at all;
     Or, if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self,
     Which is the god of my idolatry,
     And I’ll believe thee.

DEIFICATION OF PERSONS

Thus Shakspere knew that love is, as Emerson defined it, the “deification of persons,” and that women adore as well as men.  Helena, in All’s Well that Ends Well, says of her love for Bertram: 

                   Thus, Indian-like
     Religious in mine error, I adore
     The sun that looks upon his worshipper,
     But knows of him no more.

“Shakspere shared with Goethe, Petrarch, Raphael, Dante, Rousseau, Jean Paul, ... a mystical veneration for the feminine element of humanity as the higher and more divine.” (Dowden, III.) Within the last few centuries, adoration of femininity has become a sort of instinct in men, reaching its climax in romantic love.  The modern lover is like a sculptor who takes an ordinary block of marble and carves a goddess out of it.  His belief that his idol is a living goddess is, of course, an illusion, but the