When love first dawns on the mind, the faintest superficial contact flashes along the nerves as a thrill of delicious emotion. To walk along the beach in a stiff breeze, and have her veil accidentally flutter in his face, is a romantic incident on which a youthful lover’s memory feasts for a month. If allowed to carry her shawl on his arm, he would not feel the cold of a Siberian winter. And later, what a variety of tell-tale caresses are there by which mutual Love may be revealed! It is not the voice alone that can say “I love you”; nor the speaking eyes. Confessions of Love, proposals and acceptance—complete dramas of Love—have been enacted by the language of two pairs of feet that have accidentally touched under the table. A slight pressure of the hand in the ballroom has told thousands of lovers, before a word was spoken, that now they may soon put their arms round that lovely waist without the excuse of a waltz or polka.
One form of hand-caress, dear alike to mothers and lovers, is thus described by Professor Mantegazza: “In a caress we give and receive at the same time. The hand which distributes love, as by a magnetic effusion, receives it in return from the skin of the beloved person. Hence it is that one of the most common and most thrilling of the expressions of love consists in passing the hand through the hair. The hand finds, in this labyrinth of supple, living threads, the means of multiplying infinitely the points of amorous contact. It appears as if each hair were an electric wire, putting us into direct connection with the senses, with the heart, and even with the thoughts, of those we love. It is not without reason that woman’s hair has long been given as a token of love.”
What a clumsy thing is language, what an awkward thing a formal proposal stuttered out by a lover more embarrassed than if he were an amateur actor appearing on the stage for the first time, as Romeo before an international audience of actors and critics! How much less natural, less poetic, it is to hear the confession of Love than to feel it—
“When panting sighs the bosom fill,
And hands, by chance united, thrill
At once with one delicious pain.”—Clough.
What poet, and were he a genius in condensation, could compress into a line, a page, a volume, such an ocean of emotion as is contained in a momentary caress of the hand? Not even the moment when the lovers are “imparadised in one another’s arms” surpasses this in ecstasy.
Yet there is a more delicious rapture still in the drama of Courtship. “Love’s sweetest language is,” as Herrick says, “a kiss.” All other caresses are valueless without a kiss; for is not a kiss the very autograph of Love?
But labial contact is a subject of such supreme importance in the philosophy and history of Love that it cannot be disposed of briefly as one form of caressing, but demands a chapter by itself.