Did I not say that lovers were poets? Here is Julius talking a language that would surprise himself, were it not the natural expression of his feelings. And Rose—instead of being witty and sparkling—Rose was throughout their tour so serious and sentimental, that no one would have recognised her; but she was intensely happy in her melancholy, and would not have changed it for all the gaieties in the world.
While I contemplate, not without a touch of envy, this change and its cause, it occurs to me, that as I am, unluckily, in no danger of falling into the error myself, I may, to follow my usual bent, moralize for a moment on this all interesting subject of honeymoons.
Rightly is the first month of marriage called a honeymoon: a period of unceasing sweetness, cloying at last upon the palled and exhausted palate, unless it have something higher and better upon which to rest than its mere sweetness. Before the year is out, the "happy pair" have, alas! too often found indifference succeed to this all-exacting, all-impatient passion; a consummation not easily to be avoided, but perhaps, to be delayed.
Many ingenious writers have tried their hands at a definition of love; may I not venture after them?
Love, in its commonest form, I take to be an enthusiasm with which the mind intensifies and dignifies its desires. Unhappily, in most cases, it is only a passing enthusiasm, dying away with the gratification of its desires; and dying, because not founded on lasting qualities; dying, because the sympathies are not involved, because the moral requirements are not responded to with the same facility as the physical. A love, whose root is in passion, and only in passion, cannot be supposed to survive the first ardour of that passion. It is only when above and beyond that passion, giving it force and perpetually renewing it as from a central fire, there exists what I should call a moral passion,—an intense moral desire,—that the love can be durable. The sensuous desire is violent but limited; the moral desire is infinite: the craving which soul feels for perfect communion with soul, and the infinite variety with which that desire is maintained, give to love its lustre and its immortality.
But how are we to distinguish between these two kinds of love? How is a man to know whether he loves in the complete and exalted manner last described, and not in the limited, instinctive, perishable manner? There, I confess, lies the mystery. Time alone can solve it. No man can well discriminate in his own case, and precisely for the reason that love is an enthusiasm, which not only intensifies, but also dignifies his desires, so that in his eyes, his passion appears exalted, imperishable, unchangeable.
How many an unhappy wretch has awakened from a dream of passion, to find that after all it was only his enthusiasm which dignified the object which dignified his passion, and threw around it the lustre of immortal youth!
To think of this, to see in your own experience so many examples, is enough to make you register a vow that you will never—no never again fall in love. The vow may be registered; Love, who "laughs at locksmiths," knows the durability of such barriers as vows; and, looking down with the saucy pity of that imp Puck, exclaims—
Lord! what fools these mortals be!