CHAPTER II
LOVE KISSES
“At the time of the world’s creation kisses were created and cruel love.” Thus begins a Cypriot folk-song, and it is assuredly without the shadow of a doubt that among all nations which on the whole know kissing, it gets its sublimest meaning as the expression of love.
In the transport of love the lovers’ lips seek each other. When Byron’s Don Juan wanders one evening along the shore with his Haidee, they glance at the moonlit sea which lies outspread before them, and they listen to the lapping of the waves and the whispering murmur of the breeze, but suddenly they
Saw each other’s dark eyes darting light
Into each other—and, beholding this,
Their lips drew near, and clung into a kiss.
. . . . . . . . . .
They had not spoken, but they felt allured,
As if their souls and lips each other beckoned,
Which, being joined, like swarming bees they clung—
Their hearts the flowers from whence the honey sprung.
The kiss of love is the exultant message of the longing of love, love eternally young, the burning prayer of hot desire, which is born on the lovers’ lips, and “rises,” as Charles Fuster has said, “up to the blue sky from the green plains,” like a tender, trembling thank-offering.
Que tous les cœurs soient apaisés
Et toutes les lèvres ouvertes,
Qu’un frémissement de baisers
Monte au ciel bleu des plaines vertes!
The love kiss, rich in promise, bestows an intoxicating feeling of infinite happiness, courage, and youth, and therefore surpasses all other earthly joys in sublimity—at any rate all poets say so—and no one has expressed it in more exquisite and choicer words than Alfred de Musset in his celebrated sonnet on Tizianello:
Beatrix Donato was the soft sweet name
Of her whose earthly form was shaped so fair;
A faithful heart lay in her breast’s white frame,
Her spotless body held a mind most rare.
The son of Titian, for her deathless fame,
Painted this portrait, witness of love’s care,
And from that day renounced his art’s high claim,
Loth that another dame his skill should share.
Stranger, if in your heart love doth abide,
Gaze on my lady’s picture ere you chide.
Say if perchance your lady’s fair as this.
Then mark how poor a thing is fame on earth;
Grand as this portrait is, it is not worth—
Believe me on my oath—the model’s kiss.
W. F. H.