Declaration of love

“ To give the heart and mind out in a sigh, and seal the vow of faith and truth upon loving lips! In a word—one word speaks it all—to love! Yes, yes! to love! To feel the horizon expand around you till it seems to embrace every thing ”

“ Let me remind you, too, that steadfastness of habitual love all round our hearts, as it were, is the source and germ of all perfectness of life and conduct. 'Love and do as Thou wilt,' is a bold saying, but not too bold. For the very essence of love is the smelting of the will of the lover into the will of the beloved. ”

“ What would I refuse to sacrifice, could I be released from my vows, and permitted to declare my love in the sight of earth and heaven? While I strove to inspire her with tenderness, with friendship and esteem, how tranquil and undisturbed would the hours roll away! Gracious God! To see her blue downcast eyes beam upon mine with timid fondness! To sit for days, for years listening to that gentle voice! To acquire the right of obliging her, and hear the artless expressions of her gratitude! To watch the emotions of her spotless heart! To encourage each dawning virtue! ”

“ No more a sweet necessity,
Love must and will expand,
Loved and beloving we must be,
With open heart and hand,
Which only ask to trust and share
The deep affections which they bear.
Our love was of that early time ”

“ You cannot speak, breathe, act, or think, without adding to the admiration I feel for your charm both of body and mind. There is in you a rare combination of the ideal, the practical, and the bewitching which satisfies alike judgment, a husband's pride, desire, and hope, and which extends the boundaries of love beyond those of life itself. Oh! my loved one, may the genius of love remain faithful to me, and the future be full of those delights by means of which you have glorified all that surrounds me! ”

“ Do you think that I can consent to love you, with the certainty that you will belong to another sooner or later? It seems to me that love means living together forever: that is why, when I renounced the thought of marriage, I had to renounce the thought of love. ”

“ I believe in you, and you in me—I find in you all that you find in me—every possible human security for our future happiness. But this love must yet be consecrated; and in the eyes of the world, in which we are called upon to live, marriage is the only consecration, and marriage enchains one’s whole life. ”

“ O my beloved, may your souls be swallowed up in this love. Think and think while you will, you can never think how much you are beloved. See that you love again by way of gratitude, though not of requital: What though your souls be but narrow, and your powers but little? ”

“ It is beautiful—but it is a dream, and the time calls for a deed. We love each other. We can take our happiness now. Will you do it? Will you come away with me?
SHE. No.
HE. Then I if you cannot take your happiness, give me mine. If you cannot be a woman, be an angel, and lean down from your dream heaven to slake my earthly thirst.
SHE. No.
HE. No angel? Then a goddess! You want to be worshipped. You want to be adored. I will worship you, but not from afar, I will adore you in my own fashion. ”

“ Having lost the son of the Infante of Fortune, not only by my marriage, but also, as is known to me, by reason of his love for another, and finding myself wedded to a man whom, strive as I may, I cannot love, I resolved to set heart and affection entirely on loving you. This love I built upon that virtue which I had so often perceived in you, and to which by your own assistance I think I have attained—I mean the virtue of loving one’s honour and conscience more than life. ”

“ LOVE—MARRIAGE—BIRTH CONTROL May I make certain preliminary observations? Painters and poets depict Love to us in golden hues and arouse in us happy and sympathetic, and, I trust, reminiscent response, helping us to realise that life without the love of man and woman would be like the world without sunshine. ”

“ If this is allegory, it is also close to literal truth. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.” Is not love the better part of marriage? And how if the Lord thy God has been a gracious loving figure here on earth, who loved thee humanly as well as divinely, and died for thee at last? Will not the complete love required by the commandment become very ardent, very heart-filling? ”

“ I will not attempt to describe my sensations when I first distinctly saw the lineaments of my lover. Creation contained nothing so lovely to my sight. To see the soul, the thinking, feeling, immortal soul, flashing with enthusiasm, or darkening with tenderness, looking forth from his eyes, and feel my own mingling with his! No one but those who have once been blind, and now see, can imagine the intensity of my emotions. ”

“ Pleasant to see written on every line of their happy faces the blessedness of Nature's law of love—love began in youth-time, sincere and pure, free from all sentimental shams, or follies, or shames—love mutually plighted, the next strongest bond to that in which it will end, and is meant to end, God's holy ordinance of marriage. ”

“ But lover, if you ask of me
that I shall be your comrade, friend, and mate,
to live and work, to love and die with you,
that so together we may know the purity and height
of passion, and of joy and sorrow,
then o husband, I am yours forever
and our co-equal love will make the stars to laugh with joy
and to its circling fugue pass, hand holding hand
until we reach the very heart of God. ”

“ And first consider the intelligence. How completely love transports the loved one into him who loves! With what sweetness and delight the one lives in the memory of the other, and how earnestly the lover tries to know, not superficially but intimately, all that concerns the object of his love, and strives to enter as far as possible into his inner life!
Think next of the will, by which also the loved one lives in him who loves. ”

“ Now, my lord—feeling every inclination to love her, I may indeed say loving her before—you can easily feel how much such an attachment must have been increased; how much every feeling of tenderness and affection must have been augmented by the interest, the powerful interest of that pursuit; how everything must have combined to confirm my love for her for ever, while all my thoughts were bent upon saving her and restoring her to your arms; while the whole feelings of my heart and energies of my mind were busy with her, and her fate alone. ”

“ He yearned for her sympathy, for her love, for that sense of peace which had come upon him as he sat by her side. The tide of love, which not once in a million years is at the full in two human hearts at once, rushed over him, sweeping away pride, reason, selfishness, ambition,--all, all routed and o'erset by that warm, delicious flood of emotion. ”

“ Why do you make me love you so? Why must your image intrude itself into every plan, and all be done as you would approve, if, after all, you are to marry another? You would not wonder at the effect of what you have told me, if you knew how the hope that you would forgive me and yet be mine, has been my only comfort a long, dreary time. ”

“ Then, too, the delicate attentions of the devoted lover, his happiness even in the shadow of a smile from her, the lofty pedestal upon which to his imagination she stands, a queen and peerless; or the confiding love of the heroine of the story; blushingly confessing to herself that there is one heart on earth which is all her own, and in which none but herself can ever rule or reign. ”

“ And the difference seems to be accounted for by the reversal of ideals, by a new direction of affections. "I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou hast set my heart at liberty,"
A true conversion is, perhaps, signified, more than in any other way, by the liberty of the heart,--by this change in the object of our love. That has been the constant exhortation to us, to love that which is worthy of love. "Set your affection on things above." "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world." And we, loving the world and the things that are in the world, listen impatiently. ”

“ This is why the spouse in the Canticles is represented with one eye closed, and all the power of vision concentrated in the other, thus enabling her to gaze more intently into the very depths of the heart of her Beloved, piercing it with love. ”

“ When the woman discovers this, she begins to remember what she has given. And then strife, sin, sorrow, and their wages—death—have entered into what was perhaps at the beginning a genuine love; a love which might have had a full and fair life, if it had had the unifying and purifying influence of a common end, a great purpose.
When love possesses nothing of this kind, its power of motion is directed against itself. ”

“ IT is the nature of perfect love to seek or accept nothing for itself, to attribute nothing to itself, but to refer all to the Beloved. If this is true of earthly love, how much more so of the love of God, the reason of which is so constraining. In the two foregoing stanzas the bride seemed to attribute something to herself ”

“ Say doth love live within thy hidden heart
(Love born of dream but nurtured wakingly)
Ev'n as that Once when thy soul's eyes did see
Love's visible self, and worshipt? Or hast thou
Fall'n from thy faith in Her and Love ere now,
And is thy passion as a robe outworn?
Nay, love forbid! Yet wherefore art thou lorn
Of hope and peace if Love be still thine own? ”

“ Love aboundeth in itself, and derides and imprisons the other emotions. Wherefore she who loves, loves, and knows nothing else. And He who is to be honoured and marvelled at, still loves rather to be loved. Bridegroom and Bride they are. And what necessity or bond is there between spouses except to be loved and love? ”

“ I came here to seek consolation from a dear friend, and I found love—love that has drawn me into the whirlpool of passion. We are both being driven around in its eddying circles, and who knows but that marriage is the sunken reef on which our hearts will ultimately be shipwrecked. ”

“ Yes, the human soul is at times so strange a mystery, that another affection may have found its place beside your love for me—a love that you looked upon as a dream. But, at least, the remembrance of your love will remain sweet and dear to you, because it will have been noble and pure. ”

“ Rightly renouncing all other affections, the Bride reposes on love alone, and returns a love reciprocal. And when she has poured her whole self out in love, what is that compared with the perennial flood of that fountain? Not equals in abundance are this loving one and Love, the soul and the Word, the Bride and Bridegroom, creature and Creator—no more than thirst equals the fount. ”

“ I replied, "it is the same cloud-wrapt sphere which has always looked down on the little drama of human folly, unmoved amid the desolations of death and the fall of empires, forever whispering love, and exalting the best affections of our nature. Marriages must be made in heaven—and this pale messenger, in expanding the heart, almost persuades me that it is commissioned to teach love and awaken affection." ”

“ And it is the very synonym of life and strength, and lordly will, and clingingness, and truth, and real development; wherefore, I lay it down as another immutable truth that the true-love conjugation of man and wife is the loftiest and most sacred prayer to, and imitation of, God, possible to any creature in the whole vast realm of matter and mind, spirit and thought. ”

“ Is not love the same? Can an empty ceremony—said over two lovers—render more binding the greatest, best, and noblest sentiment of our nature. Say, Blanche!—my beautiful one, my ocean pearl!—could the words of the matrimonial service make me more constant,—make me love you more than I now do? ”

“ The lovers feel as if they were once more in possession of a blessing which belongs to them, and of which they have been long deprived by unfortunate incidents. These were our feelings, and without delay, without idle discussion, and above all, without false modesty, we abandoned ourselves to love, the only true source of nature. ”

“ Favour and disaffection am I, the protector of lovers; I disillusion those who trust me and am the very temple of the god of love and the hell of the love-lorn. But since the law of love is changed, and everything grows cold, I love now by agreement and sigh to order. ”

“ It may be years before we can live together as those who love one another as we love, may live with the good will of heaven. I only want you to become my wife in name, dearest. Our marriage must be kept a secret. ”

“ But chief the lord of my desire, My life, myself, my soul, my sire, Friends, children, all that wish can claim, Chaste passion clasp, and rapture name. Oh! spare him, spare him, gracious Pow’r: Oh! give him to my latest hour, Let me my length of life employ, To give my sole enjoyment joy. His love let mutual love excite; Turn all my cares to his delight, And ev’ry needless blessing spare, Wherein my darling wants a share. —Let one unruffled calm delight The loving and belov’d unite; One pure desire our bosoms warm; One will direct, one wish inform; Through life one mutual aid sustain ”

“ I know infinite numbers have been lost to thee, by loving those creatures for their own sake, which thou permittest, nay, even commandest to love subordinately to thee. Preserve me, I beseech thee, from all such blind affection: be thou a guard to all my desires, that they fix on no creature any farther than the love of it tends to build me up in the love of thee. Thou requirest me to love thee with all my heart: Undertake for me, I beseech thee, and be thou my security, that I may never open my heart to any thing, but out of love to thee. ”