CHAPTER VI.
THE SPIRITUAL PHILOSOPHY or LOVE AND BEAUTY.
O YOUTH! beautiful, tender, enchanting aurora of life! happy transition period between the child and the man! What soul from whose hearing
"The horns of Elfland, faintly blowing,"
have not died away for ever, can forget its sweet illusions, its wild ambitions, its incommunicable longings, its transport and its tears?
"Tears from the depths of some divine despair!"
The wonderful secret of all this is love. God created woman to be a form of love. At the age of puberty the magnetic forces of the sexes begin reciprocally to excite and attract each other. Up to that period, the boy and girl are almost indistinguishable in form and feature; then they separate,—separate, however, only to be drawn together again by irresistible powers, and reunited for ever.
The astonishing changes which take place in the physical and moral systems of both sexes at this period are explained by the doctrines advanced in the preceding chapter. Like flowers which have different affinities for the heat and light of the sun, the feminine
