A lover filled
with the longing to glorify a woman and worship her as a divine being,
has frequently experienced a certain disappointment. The beloved may
have died young--as did Beatrice--without his ever having come into
close contact with her; instinctively his soul turns heavenward--and
imagination has ample scope to transform and transfigure the dead. Or he
may have been disappointed in his mistress; it may have been that he,
attuned to pure, spiritual love, has found her all too human. He flees
from reality into the world of dreams, and envelops her with the veil of
mysteriousness and divinity. Purely spiritual love is an intense
emotion, and as men and women of flesh and blood cannot always live at
high pressure, hours of dejection and disappointment will necessarily
have to be experienced. The soul takes refuge in an illusion which
becomes more and more an end in itself, and gradually the lover creates
an inaccessibly lofty, celestial woman. For purely spiritual love
aspires to absolute transcendency; it cannot bear contact with every-day
life.
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