Comic Arithmetic

by Percival Leigh

LOVE EVOLUTION, OR GETTING IN LOVE.

This is an involuntary process, and an entanglement equally powerful with the meshes of the law. In this case, however, the pleasure increases with the entanglement, as the fly said in the honey-pot. The arms of a fair lady are the softest bonds; the poison of a maiden's lip the sweetest poison. To be in love is to be entangled in a cobweb of ten thousand ecstasies, where every string is bliss, and every mesh is beauty. In this web, Cupid sits as an angel in one corner, and Hymen on the other; thus bound with sighs, tied with kisses, linked by embraces, chained by tears, lovers disport themselves; till Hymen, in fear that they should die of ecstasy, tightens the web, and binds them hand and foot in the true lover's knot of matrimony.