But there's nothing half so sweet in life
As love's young dream.--MOORE.
All love is sweet,
Given or returned. Common as light is love,
And its familiar voice wearies not ever.--SHELLEY.
Doubt thou the stars are fire,
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar,
But never doubt I love.--SHAKESPEARE.
Let those love now who never loved before,
Let those that always loved now love the more.
1. LOVE BLENDS YOUNG HEARTS.--Love blends young hearts in blissful
unity, and, for the time, so ignores past ties and affections, as to
make willing separation of the son from his father's house, and the
daughter from all the sweet endearments of her childhood's home, to
go out together and rear for themselves an altar, around which shall
cluster all the cares and delights, the anxieties and sympathies, of
the family relationship; this love, if pure, unselfish, and discreet,
constitutes the chief usefulness and happiness of human life.
2. WITHOUT LOVE.--Without love there would be no organized households,
and, consequently, none of that earnest endeavor for competence and
respectability, which is the mainspring to human effort; none of those
sweet, softening, restraining and elevating influences of domestic
life, which can alone fill the earth with the glory of the Lord and
make glad the city of Zion. This love is indeed heaven upon earth; but
above would not be heaven without it; where there is not love, there
is fear; but, "love casteth out fear." And yet we naturally do offend
what we most love.
3. LOVE IS THE SUN OF LIFE.--Most beautiful in morning and evening,
but warmest and steadiest at noon. It is the sun of the soul. Life
without love is worse than death; a world without a sun. The love
which does not lead to labor will soon die out, and the thankfulness
which does not embody itself in sacrifices is already changing to
gratitude. Love is not ripened in one day, nor in many, nor even in
a human lifetime. It is the oneness of soul with soul in appreciation
and perfect trust. To be blessed it must rest in that faith in the
Divine which underlies every other motion. To be true, it must be
eternal as God himself.
4. LOVE IS DEPENDENT.--Remember that love is dependent upon forms;
courtesy of etiquette guards and protects courtesy of heart. How many
hearts have been lost irrevocably, and how many averted eyes and
cold looks have been gained from what seemed, perhaps, but a trifling
negligence of forms.
[Illustration: AGE COUNSELING YOUTH.]
5. RADICAL DIFFERENCES.--Men and women should not be judged by the
same rules. There are many radical differences in their affectional
natures. Man is the creature of interest and ambition. His nature
leads him forth into the struggle and bustle of the world. Love is but
the embellishment of his early life, or a song piped in the intervals
of the acts. He seeks for fame, for fortune, for space in the world's
thoughts, and dominion over his fellow-men. But a woman's whole life
is a history of the affections. The heart is her world; it is there
her ambition strives for empire; it is there her ambition seeks for
hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she
embarks her whole soul in the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked
her case is hopeless, for it is bankruptcy of the heart.
6. WOMAN'S LOVE.--Woman's love is stronger than death; it rises
superior to adversity, and towers in sublime beauty above the
niggardly selfishness of the world. Misfortune cannot suppress it;
enmity cannot alienate it; temptation cannot enslave it. It is
the guardian angel of the nursery and the sick bed; it gives an
affectionate concord to the partnership of life and interest,
circumstances cannot modify it; it ever remains the same to sweeten
existence, to purify the cup of life, on the rugged pathway to the
grave, and melt to moral pliability the brittle nature of man. It is
the ministering spirit of home, hovering in soothing caresses over the
cradle, and the death-bed of the household, and filling up the urn of
all its sacred memories.
7. A LADY'S COMPLEXION.--He who loves a lady's complexion, form and
features, loves not her true self, but her soul's old clothes. The
love that has nothing but beauty to sustain it, soon withers and dies.
The love that is fed with presents always requires feeding. Love, and
love only, is the loan for love. Love is of the nature of a burning
glass, which, kept still in one place, fireth; changed often, it doth
nothing. The purest joy we can experience in one we love, is to see
that person a source of happiness to others. When you are with the
person loved, you have no sense of being bored. This humble and
trivial circumstance is the great test--the only sure and abiding test
of love.
8. TWO SOULS COME TOGETHER.--When two souls come together, each
seeking to magnify the other, each in subordinate sense worshiping
the other, each help the other; the two flying together so that each
wing-beat of the one helps each wing-beat of the other--when two souls
come together thus, they are lovers. They who unitedly move themselves
away from grossness and from earth, toward the throne of crystaline
and the pavement golden, are, indeed, true lovers.
[Illustration: LOVE MAKING IN THE EARLY COLONIAL DAYS.]
[Illustration: CUPID'S CAPTURED VICTIM.]
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