Even a spectre’s kiss brings death. In an English variant of the ballad of Leonora, Margaret says to her dead bridegroom, who is knocking at her door at night: “Come and kiss me on the cheek and chin.”—“Perhaps I shall come to thee,” he replies, but:
If I shou’d come within thy bower,
I am no mortal man;
And shou’d I kiss thy rosy lips,
Thy days will not be long.
I shall also call your attention, in connection with the foregoing, to a curious old story of the venomous girl.
A young maiden had from her tenderest years been reared on all the most deadly poisons. Her beauty was marvellous, but her breath was so poisonous that it killed everybody who came near her. She was sent to the palace of Alexander the Great, as the king’s enemies reckoned on his falling in love with her and dying in her arms. When the king saw her he at once wanted to make her his mistress; but the shrewd Aristotle suspected treachery. He restrained the king, and had a criminal who had been sentenced to death sent for. The criminal was made to kiss the girl in presence of the king, and he fell prone on the ground, poisoned by her breath, like one struck by lightning.
This story can be traced to India. It found its way into several mediæval storybooks and attained great popularity. The monks made use of it in their sermons, and gave it an allegorical interpretation: Alexander was the good, trustful Christian; Aristotle was the conscience; the venomous girl, incontinence, which comprehends everything that is poisonous to the soul; and the criminal is the wicked man who pursues the lusts of the flesh and suffers his punishment. “Let us, therefore, abstain from all such things if we wish to reach Paradise,” is the moral that the monk draws from it at the close of his sermon.
In conclusion I will quote several expressions to which kissing has given rise:
A lady’s hat which was fashionable in England in 1850, and which had no brim to it, got the name of Kiss-me-quick. In contradistinction to this, the old-fashioned Danish hats with prominent brims were called Kiss-me-if-you-can. We have a modern variant in the Salvation lasses’ Stop-kissing-me hat.
In France, during the last century, there was a colour of the name of Baise-moi ma mignonne, called in England “heart’s-ease”: Look-up-and-kiss-me, Kiss-me-at-the-garden-gate, Kiss-me-ere-I-rise or Jump-up-and-kiss-me.
The verb “to kiss” is often used in a figurative sense, e.g., the Italians say of one who likes drinking, “He kisses the flask” (Bacia il fiasco); the Germans say of mean people, “They kiss the farthing” (Den Pfennig küssen); the English too speak of a penny-kisser.
This figurative meaning is not, however, confined to jocose expressions and phrases; on the contrary, it occurs perhaps more frequently in serious prose.