Love affair

“ 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. ”

“ 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? ”

“ And I doubt not that love has grown as often, if not oftener, where the motives that led to the marriage were practical and even sordid than where they were the bright, swift fading, and in death most foul-smelling, flowers of passion. ”

“ And you come to me and tell me this! You would cheat a woman out of her life, a girl who loves you—who promised to marry you because you told her you loved her; who no doubt learned to love you because of your love for her. ”

“ If love exists between couples, it ought to show itself in something better than mere empty words. If it does not, whole troops of discontentments come crowding at our fireside; for neglected duties, broken promises, lip affection, magnetic, or passional attraction, will not fill the bill of an anxious heart! ”

“ With assumed harshness the lady asks her lover: "Who are you, and what do you want?" He answers with ardent confidence: "Thy love I do adore, The stars live in the harmony of love, and why should not we, too, love each other?" Then the proud beauty gives herself away: she takes her flower-wreath from her hair and throws it down to her lover, promising to be his forever. ”

“ Oh, those burning moments in love, when romance has just mellowed into passion, and without losing anything of its luxurious vagueness mingles the enthusiasm of its dreams with the ardent desires of reality and earth! ”

“ As if a love which, from the first moment, both lovers feel to be, for them, the arbiter of life and death, were to be decried in favour of an affection founded on mutual esteem—the variety which, it appears, "our age demands." ”

“ Can’t you love decently, and marry becomingly? Do you think it fun to go running off o’ nights with men, and wringing tears out of hearts you were sent into this world to soothe and bless? Is romance spiced by a mother’s lamentations? Is love sweetened by a father’s groans? ”

“ This lover has strewn the roses of a month's gathering on his lady's path, only for the chance of her seeing them: as he has conquered the difficulties of the lute, only for the chance of her liking its sound; thrown his whole life into a love, which is hers to accept or reject. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But if these sentiments have been truly genuine, and if you have had the singular happy fate to attach those who understand them, you have no reason to be afraid.
Marriage, indeed, will at once dispel the enchantment raised by external beauty; but the virtues and graces that first warmed the heart, that reserve and delicacy which always left the lover something further to wish, and often made him doubtful of your sensibility or attachment, may and ought ever to remain. The tumult of passion will necessarily subside ”

“ As between yours, who would have love from him whom you have married, and hers, who hath love from him whom she hath not married, there is only the difference of a formula. Between her condition and yours, she is the freer; between her soul and yours, she is the more willingly faithful. ”

“ It put him with a startling suddenness into a fascinated, half-alarmed contemplation of marriage. Perhaps, if one could but present an open mind towards women, one would discover that not all one's capacity for love had been exhausted upon a vain object. ”

“ To the fond husband's bliss, which, day by day,
Lights up his spirit with affection's ray?
Man knows not what love is, till all his cares
The partner of his bosom soothes and shares—
Until he find her studious to please—
Watching his wishes!—Oh, 'tis acts like these
That lock her love within his heart, and bind
Their souls in one, and form them of one mind. ”

“ Any one who had observed these two from a distance,—a young and handsome man and a blooming young girl,—conversing alone in the shady meadow, would have taken them, to a certainty, for a pair of lovers, and would never have imagined that they were speaking of suffering and death, but of love, which is life itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So each young man, as he cast a last complacent glance in his mirror, recalled all sorts of romantic episodes in which wealthy damsels had fallen in love at first sight with some stranger, whom they had finally married against the wishes of their relatives,—for all these worthy bachelors had but one thought in this instance, marriage, and they even carried their honesty so far as to love marriage for the sake of marriage itself, and the bride became little more than an accessory in their eyes. ”

“ I have no right to startle or intimidate your sweet soul into any relation that might hereafter curb or dissatisfy you; if you can love me freely, with no back-lookings to any younger lover left behind, know that naught you could bestow, can ever equal the world of love and feeling which I long to lavish upon you from my heart of hearts. ”

“ But the day comes sooner or later to the married pair, when the prose pages must be turned, and poetry relegated to the background, days on which the reality of life, in all its grim nakedness, seems to banish romance, and when love needs all its strength and staying power for the fight. ”

“ 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. ”

“ What an intimacy, what an intensity of relation, I said to myself, so successful a process implied! It was of course familiar enough that when people were so deeply in love they rubbed off on each other—that a great pressure of soul to soul usually left on either side a sufficient show of tell-tale traces. ”

“ Married love evidently took no hold upon the youthful imagination, or upon that of our little selves. We wanted all the anguish to come to the unwed, and the happiness and dulness of unchanging bliss to descend upon the bridal pair. ”

“ What of this new and astonishing revelation—new and astonishing to him, at any rate—that love, to a woman, is not a mere decoction of bliss administered by a powerful and benevolent male, but a highly complicated universe of subjective illusions in which the lover is only dimly seen as a necessary but disturbing phantom of gross and agonizing ineptitudes? ”

“ It had been a love-match, as the world calls it—that is to say, a marriage brought about by a schoolgirl’s impatience to break her bonds, and a woman’s first delight in hearing herself called beautiful. ”

“ If, therefore, one of your friends complains of the freedom that reigns in this little book, let her talk on and be sure beforehand that this friend eats dry bread. We have described marriage as we think it should be—depicting smiling spouses, delighted to be together.
Is it because love is rare as between husband and wife that it is considered unbecoming to relate its joys? Is it regret, or envy, that renders you fastidious on the subject, sisters? Reserve your blushes for the pictures of that society of courtesans where love is an article of commerce, where kisses are paid for in advance. ”

“ Is marriage, as we see it practically carried out, penetrated with this vivifying and spiritualizing element? Love, indeed, calls nothing common or unclean; but, as a matter of homely fact, is there love enough in ordinary housekeeping to keep it sweet? The first year or two runs well, but how much living love survives the first olympiad? How much outlasts a decade? In marriages openly mercenary, we do not count on finding affection ”

“ Had I believed most that it is the crime of crimes to marry without love, I should have frankly made up my mind to break the engagement, but had I believed that one may love but once, and that an engagement is a marriage of the spirit, and that in giving this I had given so much to one man that I had nothing left for any other,—it is strange, but this is still taught to girls to-day,—I should have traveled that terrible road. ”

“ In marriage each one dreams that he will find the Understander—the one from whom he may set out into the world in search of treasures of knowledge and experience, and before whom the spoils may be exhibited without thought of rivalry, and with the certainty of glad apprisal. Treasures, dear to our own hearts but of no value to others, should here find appreciation, and here the tender super-sensitive germ of an idea may be watered and tended till its ripe beauty is ready to burst upon the world. ”

“ Then you imagine, do you, that there are many love marriages in the world, leaving out of the count those in novels and in the twaddling gossip men and women repeat as the true heart stories of this and that person? ”

“ Those who dread the dissolution of society through the insistence upon the rights of love, do not reflect that its right to break up marriage is allowed to the feeling, which has not only the red glow of passion, but also the clearness through which two people have become conscious of each other as a revelation of the whole unsuspected richness of life. ”

“ With such it is idleness, or fulness of bread, or fancy, masking in the guise of love. Love requires of his servants chastity in thought, in word and in deed. If one of two lovers is loyal, and the other jealous and false, how may their friendship last, for Love is slain! But sweetly and discreetly love passes from person to person, from heart to heart, or it is nothing worth. ”

“ Her confidence that honour for a woman can signify only a means of winning love; her complaint that life denies to the woman of genius the fulfilment of her most beautiful dream, love in marriage, were the prologue to innumerable tragedies during woman’s century. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Most like it was that love for a cause which was more to be encouraged by her than any woman’s love for a man, which, as she grew older, inspired her with aversion, as talk of marriage brought cynical allusions to her lips. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When knowledge and love together go to the making of each marriage, the joy of that new unit, the pair will reach from the physical foundations of its bodies to the heavens where its head is crowned with stars. ”

“ If by that you meant that, having given my promise to you to be your wife at some future time, I must school myself to love you, and will be considered false if love do not come at my bidding or yours, I say to you solemnly, release me now. I may not love, but I cannot and will not deceive you, even by simulating love that does not exist. ”

“ Go to the good heart that is my husband
Who broods upon what he calls our guilty love:—
Tell him that my love for you, no less than my love for him
Wrought out my destiny—that through the flesh
I won spirit, and through spirit, peace.
There is no marriage in heaven
But there is love. ”

“ If I were able to give girls only one sentence of advice as to how to keep their husbands in love with them, I should choose this one—Never revolt the man’s senses. For, remember, this particular aspect of affection called being in love is caused by the senses of both participants being exalted. ”

“ Love seasons and sweetens every state; love composes all controversies. In whomsoever love prevails, to them only marriage is what it should be, a pleasing combination of two persons into one home, one purse; one heart and one flesh. And this love must have two especial properties, first, It must be spiritual; secondly, matrimonial. ”

“ You believed you loved me, but I doubted my love, and I know now that no true love for you exists. We must part, and part forever. Whatever wrong may have been done, marriage to avoid disgrace would be a wrong to both of us infinitely greater. ”

“ Kind attentions mutually kept up, will always endear even indifferent persons to each other; and will not the very name of husband, and wife, lead to those attentions, to those endearments? The flame of love once raised, will burn long if fanned by both the votaries ”