All such know not that the world itself is a pillar all too small for the soul to stand upon.  This life-chase after bubbles, this fighting for trifles, this pursuit of false grails, reminds us of the story of that Grecian boy lured to his death by the enchantress.  Going into the palace garden to pluck a rose, the youth beheld the form of a young girl standing in the edge of the glimmering woods.  With soft words and sweet, she called him.  Forgetting his dear ones in the palace, the youth ran after his enchantress.  Along a pathway of flowers she danced before him, sometimes sweeping the strings of her harp, sometimes singing, and shaking her curls at his haste, ever shooting arrows from her eyes, yet ever just eluding his embrace.  On and on she led him into the bog, that covered his garments with mud, through the thorns and brambles that tore his white skin, over rocks steep and sharp.  Ever and anon the youth stopped to pluck the thorns from his hands and bind up his bleeding feet; then, gathering his torn purple about him, he plunged on, in the hope of drinking at last the sweet cup of her sorcery.  When, at the end of the day, the desire of his heart was given him, the illusion fell away, for the youth embraced not a beautiful maiden, but an old hag, who had led him into the desert to a hut whose stones were darkness and whose walls were confusion.

As the term genius includes all those forms of culture termed poetry, music, eloquence, leadership, so love is a term that includes all those shapes of human welfare known as education, refinement, liberty, happiness.  Properly defined, love is that exalted state of mind and heart when reason is luminous, when judgment and imagination glow under its influence just as the electric bulb glows under the living current.  There are three possible states and moods under which the mind may fulfill its functions.  There is a dull and quiescent condition when reason and judgment act, but act without fervor.  Power is there, but it is latent, just as heat is in the unkindled wood lying on the grate, but the heat is hidden.

Then there is a higher mood of the mind, when, under the influence of conversation or reading, the mind emits jets and flashes of thought, through witticism or story; but this creative mood is intermittent and spasmodic.  Last of all is that exalted mood when the mind glows and throbs, when reason emits thoughts, as stars blaze light; when the nimbus that overarches the brows of saints in ancient pictures literally represents the effulgence of the mind.  Work done in the lower moods is called mediocre; work done by the mind in the second stage is associated with talent, but when, through birth or ancestry, the mind works ever in regnant and supernal moods, it is called genius.  Affirming that all minds rise into this higher mood at intervals, we may also affirm that all the best work in literature or art or commerce has been wrought during these exalted states when love for the work in hand has rendered the mind luminous and crystalline.