What he is really telling us is this: "There are no more Greek games, but the race of love is still run to-day as in times gone by; youth is the season, and the atmosphere of youth is the anointing of the contestant." But the moral of the piece is its great charm, the poetical statement of a beautiful and a wonderful fact.

In almost every life there is a time when we care for only one person, and suffer much for that person's sake; yet in that period we do not care whether we suffer or die, and in after life, when we look back at those hours of youth, we wonder at the way in which we then felt.

In European life of to-day the old Greek fable is still true; almost everybody must run Atalanta's race and abide by the result.
One of the delightful phases of the illusion of love is the sense of old acquaintance, the feeling as if the person loved had been known and loved long ago in some time and place forgotten.

I think you must have observed, many of you, that when the senses of sight and hearing happen to be strongly stirred by some new and most pleasurable experience, the feeling of novelty is absent, or almost absent.

You do not feel as if you were seeing or hearing something new, but as if you saw or heard something that you knew all about very long ago.