But when I speak of Christianity I am only referring to an historical date.

Before Christianity the Northern races also thought about love very much in the same way that their best poets do at this day.

The ancient Scandinavian literature would show this.

The Viking, the old sea-pirate, felt very much as Tennyson or as Meredith would feel upon this subject; he thought of only one kind of love as real--that which ends in marriage, the affection between husband and wife.

Anything else was to him mere folly and weakness.