In an essay on "The Gods as Apparitions of the Race-Life," Edward
Carpenter, though in somewhat Platonic phraseology, thus well
states the matter: "The youth sees the girl; it may be a chance
face, a chance outline, amid the most banal surroundings. But it
gives the cue. There is a memory, a confused reminiscence. The
mortal figure without penetrates to the immortal figure within,
and there rises into consciousness a shining form, glorious, not
belonging to this world, but vibrating with the agelong life of
humanity, and the memory of a thousand love-dreams. The waking of
this vision intoxicates the man; it glows and burns within him; a
goddess (it may be Venus herself) stands in the sacred place of
his temple; a sense of awe-struck splendor fills him, and the
world is changed." "He sees something" (the same writer continues
in a subsequent essay, "Beauty and Duty") "which, in a sense, is
more real than the figures in the street, for he sees something
that has lived and moved for hundreds of years in the heart of
the race; something which has been one of the great formative
influences of his own life, and which has done as much to create
those very figures in the street as qualities in the circulation
of the blood may do to form a finger or other limb.
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