Love may be compared to a musical note: to the unthinking it is a simple sound; to the more experienced it is know to consist of endless and complicated harmonical vibrations; harmonizing with some, and making discord with other, notes by regular but unknown laws; differing according to the timbre of the emitter; reverberating under certain conditions; lost to the ear in others; and only responding to resonators vibrating synchronously with itself. Lastly,
There is a whole gamut of love.--Changing that simile, we may say that
Love is not like the sun: a unit, and practically the same wherever seen; it is like light: all-pervading, universally diffused, and reflected and refracted and absorbed in varying degrees and varying manners by various objects. And
Than a great and pure love, can anyone point to anything on earth greater and more purifying?
The lesser luminary perturbs the tide of human passion; the greater light draws it upward--none the less veritably because in tinted formless vapor. This is symbolical of love.
It is the nascent thing that evokes the keenest emotions: the bud--the babe--dawn--and the first beginnings of love. So Love, like sun-light, wears its most tender tints at dawn.
It still remains a mystery that, out of a townful of folk, two particular hearts should worry themselves into early graves because this one cannot get that other. Yet
It is almost enough to destroy one's faith in the uniqueness of love to see from how narrow a circle of acquaintances men and women choose their spouses. Were Plato's two half-souls separated by the diameter of the globe--that were lamentable.
The man often argues that esteem will grow into passion. The woman knows that the argument is utterly fallacious. Yet Unless passion is guarded by esteem,--as the calyx ensheaths the corolla, the former is prone to wither.
In youthful love, as in the enfolded bud, esteem and passion--like calyx and corolla---seem one and identical;
It is only the full-blown flower that displays its constituent parts.
Would that love could remain ever in bud!
To some love comes like a flash; to others as the burning of tinder.
In all, when real love is kindled, it devours all that is combustible. But