Love

“ Mid the ruin its madness too often hath made,
As it keeps even then a bright trace of the heaven,
That heaven of Virtue from which it has strayed—
This entireness of love which can only be found,
Where Woman like something that's holy, watched over,
And fenced from her childhood with purity round,
Comes body and soul fresh as Spring to a lover!
Where not an eye answers, where not a hand presses,
Till spirit with spirit in sympathy move;
And the Senses asleep in their sacred recesses
Can only be reached thro' the temple of Love! ”

“ And if these pleasures may thee move,
Then live with me, and be my Love.
Loves Answer.
If that the World and Love were young,
And truth in every Shepherds toung,
These pretty pleasures might me move
To live with thee and be thy love. ”

“ 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? ”

“ On a mere hope of love dwindled to this—
To fall some fair waste moment at her side
And feel perhaps a tear or even a kiss;
Since surely, in some waste of day or night,
He thought, the face of love out of the Past,
With look of his, should rise up in her sight
And make some kind of pleading at the last. ”

“ LOVE IS ENOUGH: draw near and behold me
Ye who pass by the way to your rest and your laughter,
And are full of the hope of the dawn coming after;
For the strong of the world have bought me and sold me
And my house is all wasted from threshold to rafter.
—Pass by me, and hearken, and think of me not! ”

“ From morn till night, even where I list to sport me:
Is love so light, sweet boy, and may it be
That thou shouldst think it heavy unto thee?
'Is thine own heart to thine own face affected?
Can thy right hand seize love upon thy left? ”

“ So it is with Love. It is stirred to life by My breath, but watching too it takes for it to blossom and bear fruit. Bear love in your mind, when action you perform; bear love in your mind in duties or tasks. With eyes of pure love in all things look, even in yourselves. All things love-existence are. Do you respect them as such. Even the beginnings of worlds, the whirling mote of dust, the heart that is fertile and the heart that is barren, on all look with eyes of pure love. ”

“ Should serve the strivings of a widening age, And fashion wisdom from the social fret. Deep did Time’s lances go; thou pluck’st them forth, And on my sullen woundings laid the balm Of thy life’s sweetness. Oh, let my love be worth The keeping. My head beneath thy palm, Once more I lift Love’s chalice to thine eyes: Not till thou blessest me will I arise. ”

“ With what we most abhor, or covet most.
But of all passions that our dreams controul,
Love prints the deepest image in the soul;
For vigorous fancy, and warm blood dispense
Pleasures so lively, that they rival sense. ”

“ What a glorious return of love! Every day should they give them some token of love. Every hour should their own hearts glow with gratitude and holy respect for those who have given them being, and loved them so fervently and long. ”

“ Go to, sir, true love seeks to secure the entire happiness of the object of affection, it sacrifices its own wishes and aspirations, rather than a cloud should hang upon the loved one’s brow, a tear dim her eye, or the smile fade from her cheek. ”

“ You could gaze right into her soul, and see
The passions that sported there.
Why did we part? God knows!
It may be that she and I
Love still with as true and tender a love
As we swore in the days gone by. ”

“ On the contrary, they are encompassed with an atmosphere of tenderest love and purest wisdom. Love prompts, and wisdom directs, all that is done to them and for them. Love breathes in every tone they hear; love beams in every face they see; love moulds the forms, and prompts the words, and shapes the deeds of all around them. ”

“ 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} ”

“ Or, if thou fain wouldst look upon the ruin passion’s hands Can wreak on lovers, let thy gaze upon my body light.
And his eyes ran over with tears and he repeated these verses also:
Who loves not the necks and the eyes of the fair and pretends, forsooth, To know the delight of the world, God wot, he speaks not the truth
For in love is a secret meaning that none may win to know Save he who has loved indeed and known its wrath and ruth.
May God not lighten my heart of passion for her I love Nor ease my eyelids, for love, of wakefulness in my youth! ”

“ This is the second half of the activity of upper or self-less or spiritual love. There is a tremendous great joy in exploring and discovering the beloved. For what is the beloved? She is that which I myself am not. ”

“ You know what love is. Think of such love as yours can have been, and take twice that, and three times over, and a hundred thousand times, and cram it, burning, flaming, melting into your bursting heart—then you would know a tenth of what I have known. ”

“ That is, in the sweetness of our love; not only in that sweetness of ordinary union, but also in that which flows from active and affective love, whether in the will by an act of affection, or outwardly in good works which tend to the service of the Beloved. For love, as I have said, where it is firmly rooted, ever runs after those joys and delights which are the acts of exterior and interior love. All this the soul does that it may be made like to the Beloved. ”

“ 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? ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ Love, the third of that trinity of graces, was the other great secret and lesson of this life. And what is love? Not merely a complacent affection for what is lovable, which is often only a half-selfish taking of pleasure in the society and fellowship of those who love us. ”

“ Item: To lovers, I devise their imaginary world, with whatever they may need, as the stars of the sky, the red roses by the wall, the bloom of the hawthorn, the sweet strains of music, and aught else by which they may desire to figure to each other the lastingness and beauty of their love. ”

“ How great is the mystery of love! How priceless the blessing it brings to the lover! How brilliant the constellation, how spiritualizing the multitude of new thoughts to which it gives birth! How I pity those who have not been touched and quickened by the life-giving power of love! ”

“ Oh love, there is no word, no sign, No token half so sweet as thine, When sighing hours, when ling’ring years, When hopes deferred, when pallid fears, Are banish’d all, and, at a start, Kind heart is riveted to heart. ”

“ An affection that shows itself not in caresses alone, as if these were the only demonstration of love, but of that respect which distinguishes love as a principle, from that brief passion which assumes, and only assumes, the name—a respect which consults the judgment as well as the wishes of the object beloved, which considers her who is worthy of being taken to the heart as worthy of being admitted to all the counsels of the head. ”

“ 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. ”

“ O’er lapse of time and change of scene,—
The weary waste which lies between
Thyself and me, my heart I lean.
Thou lack’st not Friendship’s spell-word, nor
The half-unconscious power to draw
All hearts to thine by Love’s sweet law. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Although our undivided loves are one:
So shall those blots that do with me remain,
Without thy help, by me be borne alone.
In our two loves there is but one respect,
Though in our lives a separable spite,
Which though it alter not love's sole effect,
Yet doth it steal sweet hours from love's delight. ”

“ Of murmuring, sparkling, living love,
What have I? shall I dare to tell?
A comfortless and hidden well.
A Well of love—it may be deep—
I trust it is, and never dry:
What matter? if the Waters sleep
In silence and obscurity. ”

“ The lover, whose soul shaken is In some decuman billow of bliss, Who feels his gradual-wading feet Sink in some sudden hollow of sweet, And 'mid love's usèd converse comes Sharp on a mood which all joy sums— An instant fine compendium of The liberal-leavèd writ of love— His abashed pulses beating thick At the exigent joy and quick, Is dumbed, by aiming utterance great Up to the miracle of his fate. ”

“ I could adore the man I loved. Will all the triumphs of the world and the sense of the good I do to others console me during the years to come for the sunshine of love to which every woman has a claim? ”

“ Ah! well-a-day! would there were in human hearts as much of genuine love! No sham-tenderness, nor aristocratic, cold-blooded, repelling fondness, is there in her embracing, stronger than a human heart’s beating is that which proclaims the life that is in her! ”

“ And my soul also is the song of a loving one.
Something unappeased, unappeasable, is within me; it longs to find expression. A craving for love is within me, which speaks itself the language of love. ”

“ My friend, I have dearly paid for one conviction.—Love, in some minds, is an affair of sentiment, arising from the same delicacy of perception (or taste) as renders them alive to the beauties of nature, poetry, &c., alive to the charms of those evanescent graces that are, as it were, impalpable—they must be felt, they cannot be described.
Love is a want of my heart. ”

“ If for a moment she looked back her life appeared to her as a fruitless quest for something—who knows what?—for beauty, for happiness, for an absolute and harmonious intimacy, for everlasting fulfilment in a love that is the answer to all questions. ”

“ To glorious bodies, panoplied for love,
Born to hear sweetest words that can be said,
To give and gather kisses, and to move
All men with longing after them,—to know
What flowers of paradise for lovers grow. ”

“ Love was the subject of the song,—Love, not considered as an infant boy, nor as a merciless tyrant,—but Love depicted as the personification of every thing voluptuous, blissful, and enchanting,—Love, the representative of all the joys which earth in reality possesses, or which the warmest imagination could possibly conceive,—Love apart from the refinements of sentiment, and contemplated only as the paradise of sensualities. ”

“ So I say unto all of you, love one another. See in each a perfection that ye know exists. Ah, how beautiful is the true you. Of all of us. Let us see this beauty. Let us see ourselves and our brothers and sisters for what they are. ”

“ They were all alone these two in the mad and beautiful world, which man has created for himself—the world of romance—that world more wonderful than any heaven, where only those may enter who have learned the sweet lesson of love. ”

“ Love paints the cheek with roses, adds new lustre and intelligence to the eye, imparts strength and elasticity to the step, grace and dignity to the mien, courage to the heart, elo- quence to the tongue, and poetry to every thought. ”

“ Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity.
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.
Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste.
Wings, and no eyes, figure unheedy haste. ”

“ Is it love? Yes; but not as men call love. Ours is heavenly love, ardent, but yet spiritual; intense, but without passion; a burning love like that of the cherubim; all-consuming, all-engrossing, and enduring for evermore. ”

“ His Love ‘for thee.’ Not a passive, possible love, but outflowing, yes, outpouring of the real, [132] glowing, personal love of His mighty and tender heart. Love not as an attribute, a quality, a latent force, but an acting, moving, reaching, touching, and grasping power. Love, not a cold, beautiful, far-off star, but a sunshine that comes and enfolds us, making us warm and glad, and strong and bright and fruitful. ”

“ Let others for my love give love to me;
⁠From other souls, O, gladly will I take,
⁠This burning, heart-dry thirst of love to slake,
⁠What seas of human pity there may be!
Nay, nay, I care no more how love may grow,
⁠So that I hear thee answer to my call;
⁠Love me because my piteous tears do flow,
Or that my love for thee did first befall.
⁠Love me or late or early, fast or slow—
⁠But love me, Love, for love is all in all!
VII—BODY AND SOUL
I
O, thou my Love, love first my lonely soul! ”