All hope abandon ye who enter here. It is a terrible haunt of pessimism,
for disappointed lovers only. All others will please pass it by, for the
object of this book is to advocate the cause of Love, not to weaken it.
Only when all hope of reciprocation is abandoned, should the tender
plant ever be crushed underfoot.
An exception must be made in favour of those hopeful lovers who merely
wish to cure themselves in order to improve their chances of winning, as
explained in the last chapter, under the head of Feigned Indifference.
It is useless to quote to a rejected lover Rosalind’s philosophy: “Our
poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there
was not any man died in his own person, _videlicet_, in a love cause....
Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for
love.” Useless to tell him, as Emerson does, that it is not a disgrace
to love unrequitedly: “It never troubles the sun that some of his rays
fall wide and vain into ungrateful space, and only a small part on the
reflecting planet.”
To all such efforts at consolation the poor wretch may retort with
Shakspere: “Every one may master a grief but he who has it.” Yet he may,
at any rate, endeavour to “patch his grief” with the following
reflections, based on the experience of centuries.