“The air I breathe in a room empty of you is unhealthy,” wrote Keats to his sweetheart; and Burns, in the sketch of his first love, thus describes the emotional hyperæsthesia produced by Love: “I didn’t know myself why the tones of her voice made my heart-strings thrill like an Æolian harp, and particularly why my pulse beat such a furious rattan when I looked and fingered over her little hand to pick out the cruel nettle-stings and thistles.”
This is the true ecstasy of Love—the most delicious and thrilling emotion of which the human soul is capable. Nor is it necessary to be a poet to feel it. While in Love even a coarser-grained man “feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins” (Emerson). But if Jealousy rouses him, it is flower-blood no longer that courses in his veins, nor human blood, but vengeful Spanish wine. It is then that Love’s intoxication reaches its climax: delirious ecstasy followed by angry waves of dire despair, rocking and tossing the unhappy victim till he is pale and sick as death.
Like other drunkards, the Love-intoxicated youth sees and feels everything double. His darling seems doubly beautiful, and all his joys and sorrows are doubled in intensity. And, like other drunkards, he imagines that all the world is drunk and reeling; whereas the rapid oscillation of surrounding objects between the rosy hue of hope and the gray cloud of doubt, is all in his own mind.
How this erotic intoxication multiplies the lover’s courage and confidence in his success! The most insignificant smile raises him over all obstacles to the summit of his hopes, as easily as a cloud-shadow climbs a mountain side o’er treetops, rocks, and snowy walls.
How, on her part, it magnifies his heroism, his genius, converting the most insipid commonplace into an immortal epigram, full of wit and wisdom!
That Lovers’ Hyperbole is nothing but Love-intoxication shows itself also in the ludicrous tasks they undertake when under the spell. Who but a lover would ever attempt to gild refined gold, to paint the lily white, the sky blue? Who mix up physiology, astronomy, gastronomy, in such an absurd way as in “sweet-heart,” “honey-moon,” etc.?
And when, during the “honey-moon,” the lover recovers from his intoxication, how surprised he looks, how he rubs his eyes and wonders where the deuce he has been! He remembers Ovid’s caution that after wine every woman seems beautiful; he remembers something about seeing “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.” And the girl by his side—he thought she was Helen; but now, “really—this is most extraordinary: just look at that large mouth, and that snub-nose—well, I knew she had it, and thought I loved her all the more for this imperfection, which proved her human and not a goddess: yet, by Jove, I almost wish ... in fact, I quite wish, her mouth was smaller and her nose larger.”
Poor deluded youth! He was taken in by Cupid’s favourite trick of dazzling a lover with a pair of brown or blue orbs, till he can see nothing else. For this girl, beyond question, has a pair of eyes which Venus might envy—mid-ocean-blue, with a dewdrop sparkle, and a mischievous expression that is more commonly found in brown eyes; and these deep-blue eyes are framed in with black brows and long black lashes, without which no eyes are ever perfect, whatever their colour. It was these expressive orbs, this visible music of the spheres, that ravished all his senses and made him blind to every other feature of her countenance.
Thus we see how Love comes to be blind. One feature—most commonly the eyes—dazes the victim so completely that all the other features are seen but vaguely as in a dream; while the imagination is ever busy in chiselling them into harmony with the fine eyes. And it is only after marriage, or assured possession, that the other features emerge from their blurred vagueness, and are found less perfect than the fond imagination had painted them.
In this eagerness of Love to see only superlative excellence, and its disposition to imagine a thing perfect if it is not, we get a deep insight into the mission and raison d’être of this passion. If women and men would only try to live up to Love’s exalted ideal of personal perfection—and most persons could be 50 per cent more beautiful, if they attended to the laws of hygiene and cultivated their minds—what a lovely planet this would be!