“I loved Ophelia: forty thousand brothers
Could not, with all their quantity of love,
Make up my sum.”
“It is a strange thing,” says Bacon, “to note the excess of this
passion, and how it braves the nature and value of things by this, that
the _speaking in a perpetual hyperbole_ is comely in nothing but in
love.”
It is the nature of all passions to exaggerate: and Love, being of all
passions the most violent, exaggerates the most—more even than Hate,
which alone competes with Love in the power to tinge every object with
the colour of its own spectacles. The lover’s constant sigh is for
something stronger than a superlative; and to the limit between the
sublime and the ridiculous he is absolutely blind. Like Schumann, every
lover calls his Clara “Clarissima,” and of two superlative facts he is
quite certain: That _she_ is the most wonderful being ever created; and
that _his_ passion is the deepest ever felt by mortal.
“Transparent heretics, be burnt for liars!
One fairer than my love! The all-seeing sun
Ne’er saw her match since first the world begun.”
SHAKSPERE.
If you try to convince him that others have loved as ardently—and ceased
to love, he will smile a cynical smile and then close his eyes and
declaim melodramatically—
“And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry—
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.”—BURNS.
In such hyperbolic effusions a lover sees no exaggeration, for they
describe his feelings and convictions precisely as they are.
“What we mortals call romantic,
And always envy though we deem it frantic” (BYRON)
is to him bare reality, nothing more. Romeo expresses his real wish for
the moment when he says—
“O that I were a glove upon that hand
That I might touch that cheek;”