Love scene

“ The delicacy of her love scenes, the lightness of touch that distinguishes her numerous flirtations can only be equalled by the pathos she has thrown into her work every now and then, as if to temper her brightness with a little shade. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The full moon shone in a cloudless sky, sown thick with stars; the air was warm and fragrant, and seemed to pulsate with love. Every girl remembers how on such a night she has hung over the front gate, gowned in white, with a rose in her hair, waiting and watching for a lover dearer to her heart than all the world beside! ”

“ My lover has handsome, intelligent blue eyes—my ideal's eyes are black, full of sadness and fire, not the soft, troubadour eye with long drooping lids—no! My ideal's glance has none of the languishing tenderness of romance, but is proud, powerful, penetrating, the look of a thinker, of a great mind yielding to the influence of love, the gaze of a hero disarmed by passion! ”

“ And, creeping through her young heart like a slow surreptitious flame—falling into place, curving with darts of ardent colour into the pattern—most recent, most intimate intuitions of what a woman's love might mean. ”

“ Why, asks the impatient reader, should not a romance be always full of this glow, and colour, and passion? The warm light that touches the oval outline of a tender woman's face is a beautiful thing, and even the sadness of love is beautiful: why should not a romance be full of these supreme elements? Why should not the romancist cut out the long prose passages of a man's life, and give us only those wonderful moments in which being glows with a sort of transformation? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The lover recognised the place where she whose presence was all-inspiring reposed, and each knew where were interred those who had been lights to their world of love, and on which grave to shed the drop born of affection and sorrow. ”

“ 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! ”

“ And she dreamed that she was a fair young bride
In a pure white dress by her husband's side.
A blush crept over her pale young face,
And her thin lips smiled with a girlish grace;
But the old storm-king made his boast aloud
That his work that night was weaving a shroud.
Love's Return.
Love has come back—ah me, the joy!—
Greater than when Love began
To wound my heart. The jocund boy!
Love has come back a gray-haired man. ”

“ 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 eye glows with noble desire; enthusiasm shines from that fair brow, surmounted only by clustering curls, not yet by the laurel wreath. He is a poet. The wondrous smile of love, of life, is on his lips; romance dwells in these thoughtful eyes, drollery in the cheeks' roguish curves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is strange: this evening I live with the whole of my body for the first time. I exist wherever it is. Even as I stand here fixed and tense in front of the glass, I follow a line which may arch, swell and melt away and which already bears the shape of love.
I can imagine everything ... for there's no need of having loved in order to be a lover. ”

“ POETIC DESIRE FOR CONTACT Besides such direct comparisons of feminine charms to flowers, to sun and moon and other beautiful objects of nature, amorous hyperbole has several other ways of expressing itself. The lover longs to be some article of dress that he might touch the beloved, or a bird that he might fly to her, or he fancies that all nature is love-sick in sympathy with him. ”

“ I know not how it happens when I lift my eyes to your beauty; but all the joy of the sky is in the tears which I shed before you--a lover before the lady of his love. When the soft waves of the air play round my breast, my whole being is speechless and listens. ”

“ So my story flops down into the comedy of the lying, cramped intrigues of a respectable, married man...I was still driven by my dream of some extravagantly beautiful inspiration called love and I sought it like an area sneak. Gods! What a story it is when one brings it all together! ”

“ Already she has woven bright dreams wherein are clearly portrayed outlines of two fond beings living in the sunshine of each other's love, surrounded by the comforts and ease of a bright and happy fireside. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How immeasurably far from, yet how familiarly near to, the world in which we move and have being is that fairy-land of romance which opens out from the hard earth before us, when Love steals at first to our side, fading back into the hard earth again as Love smiles or sighs its farewell! ”

“ His close watch of the blameless girl's whole life confirmed the warm and romantic wishes of his soul, which her beauty inspired—that beauty as fully confirming the vision of his love-dream when far and long away. ”

“ The city and the crowd unidealise love; and love, in the young warm heart of a girl, should be a dream apart from all commoner emotions—as sweet and as ethereal as the blush with which it is born and dies. Beauty gives its own gracefulness to love—there must be romance blended with the passion inspired by the very lovely face which the mirror reflected. ”

“ As the alarmed heart leaps in the breast,
And knows and names and greets its godlike guest—
Thus doth Love speak.
How does Love speak?
In the proud spirit suddenly grown meek—
The haughty heart grown humble; in the tender
And unnamed light that floods the world with splendor;
In the resemblance which the fond eyes trace
In all fair things to one beloved face;
In the shy touch of hands that thrill and tremble ”

“ 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. ”

“ Glancing across the room I intercepted the tender looks of two lovers, looks of mutual love that brought me back to my own misery, and made my heart bleed afresh at the thought that love like this might have been mine! What is more touchingly beautiful than the sight of a betrothed couple who exist in a little world of their own, and, ignoring the indifferent crowd around them, gaze at each other with such a wealth of love and trust in the future! ”

“ Up then she rose and took his hand
And never a moment did they stand.
“Come, love,” she cried, “the ways I know,
How thick soe’er the thickets grow.
O love, I love thee! O thine heart!
How mighty and how kind thou art!” ”

“ "One moral's plain," cried I, "without more fuss;
Man's social happiness all rests on us:
Through all the drama—whether damn'd or not—
Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot. ”

“ Love, fond wife, in hope, in joy, despondency,
Or bitter grief, whatever ills befall, I'm arm'd.
Thus as I press thee trembling to my heart,
In absence still, in fancied presence thou;
If those dear eyes rain tears at fortune's frowns,
Crosses or evil tidings touch of woe;
Oh, kill me not by weeping now, sweet wife!
If thou desirest death, my love, one sword,
One blow, shall give our hearts' blood to the earth!
Those who now seek our lives may slay; but still
Our souls shall live unparted after death! ”

“ In the true lover this unspoken and unconscious longing is perhaps less a desire to set out upon a fresh journey, than a longing to experience again the exquisite joy of the return; to re-live the magic charm of the approach to the spot in which the loved one is living her life, into the sacred separateness of which the lover breaks, and, like the Prince by his kiss, to stir her to fresh activity. ”

“ But my dear boy, we are surrounded by romance; the newspapers are full of it; the houses all around us are full of it. The slums you describe with so much bitterness are full of it. Let me ask you this: have you ever been in love? ”

“ Never in after life has the world such a marvellous glamour as when the first dream of love has swathed all contours in its opalescent mists of sunrise, but—never do we so easily go astray. It may happen that the lifting of the mists will disclose the most beautiful landscape. ”

“ And now that the time was come to declare the love in words, and ratify it by a plighted troth, there was something in the act so solemn as almost to disturb their dream of a lover’s paradise.
They sat silent on the rock until the sun had set behind the peaks of snow, and their eyes were filled with idle yet delicious tears. ”

“ 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? ”

“ Some there are who maintain, with plausibility, that the passion we call love may be of frequent recurrence, and they point to the passing fancies of boys and girls, the romances of moonlight, the repeated sighings of the fickle Corydon, and the matrimonial entanglements of the aging Lydia, as evidence for their argument. ”

“ How divine my Flora's flower!
A third "poem of privacy" may be employed to temper this too fervid mood. I conceive it to be meant for the monologue of a lover in the presence of his sweetheart, and to express the varying lights and shades of his emotion.
THE LOVER'S MONOLOGUE. No. 35.
Love rules everything that is:
Love doth change hearts in a kiss:
Love seeks devious ways of bliss:
[115] Love than honey sweeter,
Love than gall more bitter.
Blind Love hath no modesties.
Love is lukewarm, fiery, cold;
Love is timid, overbold ”

“ Those gentle and lady-like poems 'of the affections,' with their nice sentiments, the faded ribbons of their second-hand romance, seemed to the child like a beautiful glimpse into the real, tender, not too passionate world, where men and women loved magnanimously, and had heroic sufferings, and died, perhaps, but for a great love, or a great cause, and always nobly. ”

“ In the first song a lover, standing on the slope of a hill, perceives the window of his mistress, shining like a jewel in the distance. In a beautiful and melodious soliloquy he calls upon the lights and shadows, the winds and clouds, which are all pursuing one direction the house of his love. ”

“ This feeling, it may be hoped, will gradually win for itself the same freedom in life as it already possesses in poetry. The flowering, as well as the budding of love will then be a secret between the lovers, and only its fruit will be a matter between them and society. ”

“ Is it a walk of plighted lovers that the painter hints at on his canvas, and has the bride just caught first sight of her future home? Or, can the scene be one tenderer still? The middle-aged lover looks—calmly, earnestly expectant, waiting for an answer that will not come from the lady’s lips, that will certainly not be given by their words—at the noble face of the mature and stately beauty by his side, into her dear grey eyes that never meet his, but gaze right on into the distance—into the future is it? ”

“ Scatter them back to the ivory gate and be alone and rule the night.
Surely all worlds are nothing to Love, for Love to flash thro’ the night and come;
Hither and thither he flies at will, with thee he dwelleth—there is his home.
Come, O Love, with a voice, a message; haste, O Love, on thy wings of light.
Love, I am calling thee, Love, I am calling; dost thou not hear my crying, sweet?
Does not the live air throb with the pain of my beating heart, till thy heart beat?—
Surely momently thou wilt be here, surely, O sweet Love, momently.{23} ”

“ The mingling of clouds, rain and lightning symbolized the embraces of lovers, and commonplace objects such as dishes, vases, ewers and lamps were brought into subtle conjunction to hint at 'the right true end of love.' What, in fact, might seem at first sight to be a simple portrait, proved on closer understanding to be a study in despair, a revelation of delight or a clue to rapture, each image with its sexual implications contriving to express some nuance of longing. ”

“ Words may deceive, eyes seldom can. And there had been love in his eyes. Not mere liking, but actual love. She had seen it, felt it, with that almost unerring instinct that women have, whether they return the love or not. ”

“ To find our treasure of love greater than we had dared to dream—what rarer joy has earth? And when the poor derelict soul clung to his wife and found in her a help sufficient for his needs, his was a rapture not less profound than that of the poet-husband when he opened the sonnets in which a woman's soul had poured itself, counting the ways and measuring the depth and the height of her wifely love. ”