True love I think is not simply felt but known.  Just as Salvation as I conceive it demands a fine intelligence and mental activity, so love calls to brain and body alike and all one’s powers.  There is always elaborate thinking and dreaming in love.  Love will stir imaginations that have never stirred before.

Love may be, and is for the most part, one-sided.  It is the going out from oneself that is love, and not the accident of its return.  It is the expedition whether it fail or succeed.

But an expedition starves that comes to no port.  Love always seeks mutuality and grows by the sense of responses, or we should love beautiful inanimate things more passionately than we do.  Failing a full return, it makes the most of an inadequate return.  Failing a sustained return it welcomes a temporary coincidence.  Failing a return it finds support in accepted sacrifices.  But it seeks a full return, and the fulness of life has come only to those who, loving, have met the lover.

I am trying to be as explicit as possible in thus writing about Love.  But the substance in which one works here is emotion that evades definition, poetic flashes and figures of speech are truer than prosaic statements.  Body and the most sublimated ecstasy pass into one another, exchange themselves and elude every net of words we cast.

I have put out two ideas of unification and self-devotion, extremes upon a scale one from another; one of these ideas is that devotion to the Purpose in things I have called Salvation; the other that devotion to some other most fitting and satisfying individual which is passionate love, the former extensive as the universe, the latter the intensest thing in life.  These, it seems to me, are the boundary and the living capital of the empire of life we rule.

All empires need a comprehending boundary, but many have not one capital but many chief cities, and all have cities and towns and villages beyond the capital.  It is an impoverished capital that has no dependent towns, and it is a poor love that will not overflow in affection and eager kindly curiosity and sympathy and the search for fresh mutuality.  To love is to go living radiantly through the world.  To love and be loved is to be fearless of experience and rich in the power to give.

4.3.  The will to love.

Love is a thing to a large extent in its beginnings voluntary and controllable, and at last quite involuntary.  It is so hedged about by obligations and consequences, real and artificial, that for the most part I think people are overmuch afraid of it.  And also the tradition of sentiment that suggests its forms and guides it in the world about us, is far too strongly exclusive.  It is not so much when love is glowing as when it is becoming habitual that it is jealous for itself and others.  Lovers a little exhausting their mutual interest find a fillip in an alliance against the world.  They bury their talent of understanding and sympathy to return it duly in a clean napkin.  They narrow their interest in life lest the other lover should misunderstand their amplitude as disloyalty.