Othmar

by Ouida

'No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which he cannot escape or dismiss.'

'My good people,' said their sovereign impatiently, 'you wander too far afield. You are like the group of physicians who let the patient die while they disputed over the Greek root from which the name of his malady was derived. Love, like all other great monarchs, is ill sometimes; but let us consider him in health, not sickness.'

'For Love in a state of health there is no better definition than one given just now—sympathy.'

'The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of sympathy. Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only to be found in the highest natures. They are not numerous.'

'No; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund of interest, and a bottomless deposit of inexhaustible comprehension. Such reserve-funds are rare in human nature, which is usually a mere fretful and foolish chatterbox, tout en dehors, and self-absorbed.'

'We are wandering far from the single-minded passion of Ronsard and Petrarca.'

'And we have arrived at no definition. Were I to give one, I should be tempted to say that Love is, in health and perfection, the sense that another life is absolutely necessary to our own, is lovely despite its faults, and even in its follies is delightful and precious to us, we cannot probably say why, and is to us as the earth to the moon, as the moon to the tides, as the lodestone to the steel, as the dew of night to the flower.'

'Very well said, and applicable to both men and women, as descriptive of their emotions at certain periods of their lives. But——'

'For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their veins.'

'You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Well, let us pass to another question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of repletion?'