Woman, far more than man, is reared in the regions of love, and has more leisure to reflect on the secret movements of her heart, and to gather the wisdom and beauty of love and distill it as the rarest perfume of life. Love is woman's crown of divinity. Love lifts man to his highest capabilities, noblest enterprises and loftiest ideals, and makes him monarch of a larger and more beautiful world.
The history of man shows how gross and abject natures are transformed by love. How dull and stolid minds have been guided by it to paths of honor and glory. It is said that fame and science should guard themselves from love as from a dangerous enemy, and that to be a great man one must love their art alone and be wed only to their great ambitions.
Ah! but for one genius killed by love, a hundred owe to it all their greatness and inspiration and the moving force of life, and bless it as superior to fame and sweeter than all the laurels of victory or the plaudits of success.
All the glory of art and science, of thrones and crowns, is inspired by the love of woman. This was openly proclaimed in the heroic and chivalrous ages and should still be held in grateful remembrance.
If love does not always elevate and refine and work the miracles of its magic, it is because men lower their ideals of women and love. Woman has a stronger thirst after the ideal, a more refined sensibility, exquisite fancy and poetic nature and aids man to mount to loftier actions and ideals. In a beautiful picture, Dante is below, Beatrice above; he looks at her and is thus inspired, while her eyes, fixed upon him, seem to say: "Upward, upward; it is thither we must go together!" It is said nothing is so irresistible as the enthusiasm of woman. Without reason for believing, without strength for hope, sustained solely by love, she is always full of faith for the great and beautiful things, and with sublime imprudence cries, "Forward, forward!" and drags man to the most difficult summits of success.
A wise man says: "In the great and little things, after having consulted science and art, experience and imagination, after having read history and human hearts, also always consult the woman you love, whether it be a question of a book or a law, or a work of art, or of business, industry or poetry. She will certainly have something new to tell you." Ambition often fails to elevate men, they die without having attained their full measure of power. Only the love of woman could have given them the energy which ambition and self-love were powerless to bestow.
In the past ages the world prated much about aristocracy. There have been four kinds of aristocracy in the world's history. There has been the aristocracy of muscle—the supremacy of brute force. This was followed by the aristocracy of blood or family pedigree, by which one claimed by inheritance superiority over others. Then came the aristocracy of wealth, which prevails in our day, whereby those who obtain fortunes by birth, accident, parsimony, force or fraud, claim superiority over others less sordid or less fortunate. But the true and only aristocracy that ever has or ever will exist in the human race is the aristocracy of love and goodness. There is nothing so kingly as kindness, nothing so royal as truth, and nothing so godlike as love.
The aristocracy of muscle has brought misery and distress and cursed the world with cruelty and oppression; the aristocracies of blood and wealth have often brought sorrow to their possessors, and proved a rope of sand, a broken reed, a Jonas' gourd that faded in a night. But the aristocracy of love and goodness is God's aristocracy, and belongs to the society of heaven. It is a part of the family of Deity, and possesses the wealth of the universe. It is the pride of celestial hosts, and the joy and blessing of transient mortality. The humblest of earth may join this aristocracy of love and goodness and be a prince and king in his own right, by royal prerogative as eternal and enduring as the earth and stars.
Thus we find that love is the spiritual and electric law of life, and the crown-jewel of the universe; that it gives life and inspires it; that all the creations and forces of nature are dual and sexual, with love as the supreme sovereign of all life and destiny.
Magnificent are the pyramids of Cheops, but while they and the groves of gods and pillars at Karnac were being reared for a tyrannous nobility and priesthood, twenty thousand common men agonized and died in the quarries. Beautiful was Athens, "The City of the Violet Crown," when the sunlight flashed from the Parthenon; but Aristides was banished because he was just, and Socrates was murdered because he taught the oneness of God. Rome sat on her seven hills and ruled the world; but men were butchered in the arena to make a Roman holiday, and at night Christians were burned for torches to light up Nero's golden house. All this was because love had not exalted the ideals and energized the wills of men.