[26] The poet here, no doubt, copied from the mode of his own time, since kissing a lady in a public assembly was not then thought indecorous. In King Henry VIII., Act i., scene v., Lord Sands is represented as kissing Anne Boleyn, next whom he sat at supper.
[27] The handkerchief.
[28] In the serious treatment of this idea the following lines from Whittier’s “Angels of Buena Vista” are among the most beautiful:
“Whispered low the dying soldier, pressed her hand and faintly smiled:
Was that pitying face his mother’s? did she watch beside her child?
All his stranger words with meaning her woman’s heart supplied;
With her kiss upon his forehead, ‘Mother,’ murmured he, and died.”
[29] The readers of Byron’s “Don Juan” will remember the wish
“That womanhood had but one rosy mouth,
To kiss them all at once, from North to South.”