All these things are of extreme interest as showing the blind
struggles of a great idea to emerge from the mist into daylight. The
greatest obstacle to the recognition of the fact that love has a
history, and is subject to the laws of evolution lay in the habit of
looking upon it as a simple feeling.
When I wrote my first book on love, I believed that Herbert Spencer
was the first thinker who grasped the idea that love is a composite
state of mind. I now see, however, that Silvius, in Shakspere's _As
You Like It_ (V. 2), gave a broad hint of the truth, three hundred
years ago. Phoebe asks him to "tell what 't is to love," and he
replies:
It is to be all made of sighs and tears....
It is to be all made of faith and service....
It is to be all made of fantasy,
All made of passion, and all made of wishes,
All adoration, duty, and observance,
All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,
All purity, all trial, all obedience.
Coleridge also vaguely recognized the composite nature of love in the
first stanza of his famous poem:
All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of love,
And feed his sacred flame.