Love as its physician and preserver. For Love brings the soul through the body to truth and the region of truth, where pure and guileless beauty is to be found, kindly befriending its votaries like an initiator at the mysteries. And it associates with the soul only through the body. And as geometricians, in the case of boys who cannot yet be initiated into the perception of incorporeal and impassive substance, convey their ideas through the medium of spheres, cubes, and dodecahedrons, so celestial Love has contrived beautiful mirrors of beautiful things, and exhibits them to us glittering in the shapes colours and appearances of youths in all their flower, and calmly stirs the memory which is inflamed first by these. Consequently some, through the stupidity of their friends and intimates, who have endeavoured by force and against reason to extinguish the flame, have got no advantage from it, but filled themselves with smoke and confusion, or have rushed into secret and lawless pleasures and ingloriously wasted their prime. But as many as by sober reason and modesty have abated the extravagance of the passion, and left in the soul only a bright glow—not exciting a tornado of passion, but a wonderful and productive diffusion, as in a growing plant, opening the pores of complaisance and friendliness—these in no long time cease to regard the personal charms of those they love, and study their inward characters, and gaze at one another with unveiled eyes, and associate with one another in words and actions, if they find in their minds any fragment or image of the beautiful; and if not they bid them farewell and turn to others, like bees that only go to those flowers from which they can get honey. But wherever they find any trace or emanation or pleasing resemblance of the divine, in an ecstasy of pleasure and delight they indulge their memory, and revive to whatever is truly lovely and felicitous and admired by everybody."
§ xx. "The poets indeed seem for the most part to have written and sung about Love in a playful and merry manner, but have sometimes spoken seriously about him, whether out of their own mind, or the god helping them to truth. Among these are the lines about his birth, 'Well-sandalled