Than all other pleasures are,
he must not be supposed to refer to the love that has been blighted by cold neglect or open disdain. Burns describes the pains of love when parted from its object in very different language—as ‘A woe that no mortal can cure.’ Dryden’s reflection is rather in the same strain as that of the love-sick Hibernian who said it was ‘a moighty recreation to be dying of love. It sets the heart aching so delicately there’s no taking a wink of sleep for the pleasure of the pain.’ Moore gives a less paradoxical and more serious exposition of the case than his love-sick compatriot:
Yes—loving is a painful thrill,
And not to love more painful still;
But surely ’tis the worst of pain
To love and not be loved again.
Various specifics have been prescribed for the cure of love, and among these, matrimony has been suggested as an infallible cure. A grim joke, my masters! but one in which there is only a certain modicum of truth. Whether, because the love is spurious, or because its fire is less unquenchable than the poets would have us believe, it is yet too true, and one of the saddest facts of human experience, that the love which glows so bright and radiant on the wedding morn, may, before many years have flown, be cold and dead as the ashes of a fire that has long gone out.
When the idol is shattered, and love neither dies nor breaks the heart, it sometimes—and here is another enigma—changes its nature; becomes, in fact, the opposite of itself. The operation is not without analogy. The arch-fiend himself was once an angel of light, and so we may find adoring love become venomous hate.
It is a profitless task to apply the why and the wherefore to love-affairs. Byron, who himself knew so much about love, says:
Why did she love him? Curious fool, be still;