LITT

ITTLE think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of mutual intelligence of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled.

'Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,

That one might almost say her body thought.'

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other aim, asks no more than Juliet-than Romeo.

Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of permutation and combination of

The
Dawn of
Love

The

Noontide of Love

all possible positions of the parties, to extort
all the resources of each, and acquaint each
with the whole strength and weakness of the
other. For it is the nature and end of this re-
lation, that they should represent the human
race to each other. All that is in the world

which is or ought to be known, is cunningly
wrought into the texture of man, of woman.
'The person love does to us fit,

Like manna, has the taste of all in it.'

Love.

The world rolls: the circumstances vary every hour. All the angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and all the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other, without complaint, to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in time;

and exchange the passion, which once could not lose sight of its object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs. Looking at these aims, with which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeketh virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom.

I

Love.

CAN do that by another which I cannot do alone. I can say to you what I cannot first say to myself.

Representative Men.

The Evening of Love

One
Man
Supple-
ments
Another