"When beauty fires the blood, how love exalts the mind," exclaimed
Dryden; and Romeo asks:
Did my heart love till now? forswear it, sight!
For I ne'er saw true beauty till this night.
In full-fledged romantic love of the masculine type the admiration of
a girl's personal beauty is no doubt the most entrancing ingredient.
But such love is rare even to-day, while in ordinary love-affairs the
sense of beauty does not play nearly so important a role as is
commonly supposed. In woman's love, as everybody knows, the regard for
masculine beauty usually forms an unimportant ingredient; and a man's
love, provided sympathy, adoration, gallantry, self-sacrifice,
affection, and purity enter into it, may be of the genuine romantic
type, even though he has no sense of beauty at all. And this is lucky
for the prospects of love, since, even among the most civilized races
to-day, the number of men and women who, while otherwise refined and
estimable, have no real appreciation of beauty, personal or otherwise,
is astonishingly large.