Then came the artistic resurrection of the Renaissance, and the new reverence for the beauty of the old Greek gods, and the Greek traditions of female divinities; these also coloured and lightened the old feeling about womankind.

Think also of the effect with which literature, poetry and the arts have since been cultivating and developing the sentiment.

Consider how the great mass of Western poetry is love poetry, and the greater part of Western fiction love stories.
Of course the foregoing is only the vaguest suggestion of a truth.

Really my object is not to trouble you at all about the evolutional history of the sentiment, but only to ask you to think what this sentiment means in literature.

I am not asking you to sympathize with it, but if you could sympathize with it you would understand a thousand things in Western books which otherwise must remain dim and strange.