LOVE

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each of its joys

ripens into a new want. Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in

the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence which

shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The

introduction to this felicity is in a private and tender relation of

one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which, like a

certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period and

works a revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race,

pledges him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with new

sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses, opens the

imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes,

establishes marriage, and gives permanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the

blood seems to require that in order to portray it in vivid tints,

which every youth and maid should confess to be true to their throbbing

experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth

reject the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and

pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I know I incur the

imputation of unnecessary hardness and stoicism from those who compose

the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these formidable censors I

shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this

passion of which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes

not the old, or rather suffers no one who is truly its servant to grow

old, but makes the aged participators of it not less than the tender

maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that

kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught

from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges

until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the

universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature

with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt

to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He

who paints it at the first period will lose some of its later, he who

paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be

hoped that by patience and the Muses’ aid we may attain to that inward

view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful,

so central that it shall commend itself to the eye, at whatever angle

beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and

lingering adherence to facts, and study the sentiment as it appeared in

hope and not in history. For each man sees his own life defaced and

disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man

sees over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of

other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those delicious

relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him

sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I

know not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the

remembrances of budding joy and cover every beloved name. Every thing

is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth. But all

is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is

seemly and noble. In the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and

place—dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal,

is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the Muses sing. But

grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of

to-day and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of

personal relations usurps in the conversation of society. What do we

wish to know of any worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the

history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating libraries

circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is

told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in

the intercourse of life, like any passage betraying affection between

two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never shall meet

them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep

emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take

the warmest interest in the development of the romance. All mankind

love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness

are nature’s most winning pictures. It is the dawn of civility and

grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls

about the school-house door;—but to-day he comes running into the

entry, and meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her

books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she removed

herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the

throng of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and

these two little neighbors, that were so close just now, have learned

to respect each other’s personality. Or who can avert his eyes from the

engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who go into

the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk

half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy.

In the village they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in,

and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows

out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet

plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most

agreeable, confiding relations, what with their fun and their earnest,

about Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the party, and

who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school would

begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by

that boy wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where

to find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as Milton

deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine my reverence

for the intellect has made me unjustly cold to the personal relations.

But now I almost shrink at the remembrance of such disparaging words.

For persons are love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot

recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the

power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to

nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts. For though the

celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of

tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or

comparison and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see

after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all

other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers on the oldest brows. But

here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their

experience, that they have no fairer page in their life’s book than the

delicious memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to give a

witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its own truth, to a

parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking backward

they may find that several things which were not the charm have more

reality to this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed

them. But be our experience in particulars what it may, no man ever

forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and brain, which

created all things anew; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry,

and art; which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the

morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one

voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance

associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became

all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when

the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil,

a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary

and none too silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter

conversation in his new thoughts than any old friends, though best and

purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the

beloved object are not like other images written in water, but, as

Plutarch said, “enamelled in fire,” and make the study of midnight:—

“Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art,

Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart.”

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the

recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough, but must be

drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of

the matter who said of love,—

“All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”

and when the day was not long enough, but the night too must be

consumed in keen recollections; when the head boiled all night on the

pillow with the generous deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a

pleasing fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers and

the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an impertinence,

and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere

pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive

and significant. Nature grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of

the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The notes are almost

articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the

forest, the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown

intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the secret which

they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and sympathizes. In the green

solitude he finds a dearer home than with men:—

“Fountain-heads and pathless groves,

Places which pale passion loves,

Moonlight walks, when all the fowls

Are safely housed, save bats and owls,

A midnight bell, a passing groan,—

These are the sounds we feed upon.”

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet

sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms

akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees; he feels

the blood of the violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he

talks with the brook that wets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made

him love music and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have

written good verses under the inspiration of passion, who cannot write

well under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the

sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into

the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a heart and courage to defy

the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In

giving him to another it still more gives him to himself. He is a new

man, with new perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious

solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his

family and society; _he_ is somewhat; _he_ is a person; _he_ is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence

which is thus potent over the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to

man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine,

which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems sufficient

to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and

solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing

loveliness is society for itself; and she teaches his eye why Beauty

was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence

makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his

attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out

her own being into somewhat impersonal, large, mundane, so that the

maiden stands to him for a representative of all select things and

virtues. For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances in

his mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a

likeness to her mother, or her sisters, or to persons not of her blood.

The lover sees no resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond

mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the

nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are

touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find

whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is

destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to

organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love

known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite

other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy

and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We cannot

approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves’-neck lustres,

hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things,

which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at

appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he

said to music, “Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all

my endless life I have not found, and shall not find.” The same fluency

may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then

beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out

of criticism and can no longer be defined by compass and

measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it and to

say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is

always represented in a transition _from_ that which is representable

to the senses, _to_ that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a

stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry the success is

not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and

fires us with new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it

Landor inquires “whether it is not to be referred to some purer state

of sensation and existence.”

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself when

it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an

end; when it suggests gleams and visions and not earthly satisfactions;

when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel

his right to it, though he were Cæsar; he cannot feel more right to it

than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is that to you?” We say so

because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It

is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in

yourself and can never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient

writers delighted in; for they said that the soul of man, embodied here

on earth, went roaming up and down in quest of that other world of its

own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light

of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of

this world, which are but shadows of real things. Therefore the Deity

sends the glory of youth before the soul, that it may avail itself of

beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and

fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her

and finds the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and

intelligence of this person, because it suggests to him the presence of

that which indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul

was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped

nothing but sorrow; body being unable to fulfil the promise which

beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and

suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the

body and falls to admire strokes of character, and the lovers

contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions, then

they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their

love of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the

sun puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become pure and

hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself excellent,

magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these

nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from

loving them in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful

soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true

and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate he attains a

clearer sight of any spot, any taint which her beauty has contracted

from this world, and is able to point it out, and this with mutual joy

that they are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and

hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in

curing the same. And beholding in many souls the traits of the divine

beauty, and separating in each soul that which is divine from the taint

which it has contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest

beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this

ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The

doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato, Plutarch and Apuleius

taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo and Milton. It awaits a truer

unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which

presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world,

whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest discourse

has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs. Worst, when this sensualism

intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the hope and

affection of human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing

but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our

play. In the procession of the soul from within outward, it enlarges

its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the pond, or the light

proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things

nearest, on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the

house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household acquaintance,

on politics and geography and history. But things are ever grouping

themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood,

size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us.

Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony between the

soul and the circumstance, the progressive, idealizing instinct,

predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower

relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of

persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this at first it

gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at

each other across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual

intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this

new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in

the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances,

they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion,

to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a

perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly

ensouled:—

“Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,

That one might almost say her body thought.”

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens

fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more, than

Juliet,—than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, kingdoms, religion,

are all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all

form. The lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in

comparisons of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves with

the remembered image of the other. Does that other see the same star,

the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that

now delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding up

costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties, exult in

discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a ransom

for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be

harmed. But the lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow,

and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants with

Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is thus

effected and which adds a new value to every atom in nature—for it

transmutes every thread throughout the whole web of relation into a

golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element—is yet a

temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry, protestations,

nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in

clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and

puts on the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul

which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude, detects

incongruities, defects and disproportion in the behavior of the other.

Hence arise surprise, expostulation and pain. Yet that which drew them

to each other was signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these

virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and

continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign and

attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded affection.

Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and

combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the

resources of each and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of

the other. For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they

should represent the human race to each other. All that is in the

world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the

texture of man, of woman:—

“The person love does to us fit,

Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that

inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes

and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue,

all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once

flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in

violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good

understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the good

offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in

time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its

object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or

absent, of each other’s designs. At last they discover that all which

at first drew them together,—those once sacred features, that magical

play of charms,—was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the

scaffolding by which the house was built; and the purification of the

intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage,

foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their

consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and

a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one

house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not

wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from

early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the

nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in

the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person,

nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the

end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and

thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to

feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and

with pain, the objects of the affections change, as the objects of

thought do. There are moments when the affections rule and absorb the

man and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons. But in

health the mind is presently seen again,—its overarching vault, bright

with galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that

swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with

God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear that we can

lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be trusted to

the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations,

must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so

on for ever.

VI.

FRIENDSHIP

A ruddy drop of manly blood

The surging sea outweighs;

The world uncertain comes and goes,

The lover rooted stays.

I fancied he was fled,

And, after many a year,

Glowed unexhausted kindliness

Like daily sunrise there.

My careful heart was free again,—

O friend, my bosom said,

Through thee alone the sky is arched,

Through thee the rose is red,

All things through thee take nobler form

And look beyond the earth,

The mill-round of our fate appears

A sun-path in thy worth.

Me too thy nobleness has taught

To master my despair;

The fountains of my hidden life

Are through thy friendship fair.