for love in these languages reveal four main ways of expressing the conception:  (1) inarticulate cries of emotion; (2) assertions of sameness or similarity; (3) assertions of conjunction or union; (4) assertions of a wish, desire, a longing.  Brinton adds that “these same notions are those which underlie the majority of the words of love in the great Aryan family of languages.”  The remarkable fact emerges, however, that the peoples of Aryan tongue were slow in developing their conception of sexual love.  Brinton remarks that the American Mayas must be placed above the peoples of early Aryan culture, in that they possessed a radical word for the joy of love which was in significance purely psychical, referring strictly to a mental state, and neither to similarity nor desire.  Even the Greeks were late in developing any ideal of sexual love.  This has been well brought out by E.F.M.  Benecke in his Antimachus of Colophon and the Position of Women in Greek Poetry, a book which contains some hazardous assertions, but is highly instructive from the present point of view.  The Greek lyric poets wrote practically no love poems at all to women before Anacreon, and his were only written in old age.  True love for the Greeks was nearly always homosexual.  The Ionian lyric poets of early Greece regarded woman as only an instrument of pleasure and the founder of the family.  Theognis compares marriage to cattle-breeding; Alcman, when he wishes to be complimentary to the Spartan girls, speaks of them as his “female boy-friends.”  AEschylus makes even a father assume that his daughters will misbehave if left to themselves.  There is no sexual love in Sophocles, and in Euripides it is only the women who fall in love.  Benecke concludes (p. 67) that in Greece sexual love, down to a comparatively later period, was looked down on, and held to be unworthy of public discussion and representation.  It was in Magna Graecia rather than in Greece itself that men took interest in women, and it was not until the Alexandrian period, and notably in Asclepiades, Benecke maintains, that the love of women was regarded as a matter of life and death.  Thereafter the conception of sexual love, in its romantic aspects, appears in European life.  With the Celtic story of Tristram, as Gaston Paris remarks, it finally appears in the Christian European world of poetry as the chief point in human life, the great motive force of conduct.

Romantic love failed, however, to penetrate the masses in Europe.  In the sixteenth century, or whenever it was that the ballad of “Glasgerion” was written, we see it is assumed that a churl’s relation to his mistress is confined to the mere act of sexual intercourse; he fails to kiss her on arriving or departing; it is only the knight, the man of upper class, who would think of offering that tender civility.  And at the present day in, for instance, the region between East Friesland and the Alps, Bloch states (Sexualleben unserer