Think much, speak little, and in speaking sigh.
This is certainly a faithful description of the conventional lover, whom you meet in novels, and there are no doubt a great many sentimental people who still languish and sigh, after the old romantic pattern. Yet there are a great many more who get through all their love experiences with very little languishing and very few sighs. They are much too busy, or too cheerful, or too matter-of-fact, to indulge their passion to the pining or languishing degree; so that tears and sighs and groans are not by any means inevitable or necessary symptoms of love. While one lover is to be found ‘sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’ eyebrow,’ another is discovered basking joyfully in the sunshine of his love, and singing with Moore that
There’s nothing half so sweet in life
As love’s young dream.
Ovid remarks that tears are by no means unserviceable in love, because by tears you may touch a heart of stone. He therefore advises the lover to endeavour that his mistress should find him with his cheeks bathed in tears; and he adds, that if you are not quite equal to the shedding of genuine tears, you may bathe your eyes and cheeks by other means. But Ovid is discoursing on the art of love, and what we are at present considering are the true marks of the genuine passion. There are, no doubt, few matters in which there has been, since the world began, so much dissimulation and hypocrisy as in love affairs, and Ovid’s artful suggestions recall the profane observation of a cynical writer, that ‘Love consists of a little sighing, a little crying, a little dying—and a deal of lying.’ It is not our present purpose, however, to enter upon the false in love, or the spurious impersonations which stalk about in his name. Let it suffice to say that Ovid’s crafty advice is founded on the fact that true love is often tearful and desponding. It may not be, as Silvius puts it, ‘all sighs and tears,’ but even the most sanguine love may have its moments of sadness and doubt. ‘Love,’ says one of the poets—
Love, though most sure,
Yet always to itself seems insecure.
And Scott declares that ‘Love is loveliest when embalmed in tears.’ Another poet argues that unless you quake and are struck dumb when your mistress enters the room, you have loved amiss, and must begin anew.
But if love is sometimes downcast and fearful, it just as often soars aloft on the pinions of hope, for ‘Love can hope where Reason would despair.’ The lover has a miraculous way of finding hope and encouragement amid the most unpromising circumstances. He can feed for weeks together on a word or a glance; and if his mistress frown and turn her back upon him, he must still lay the flattering unction to his soul that she merely frowns, as Shakspeare expresses it somewhere, to beget more love in him. Truly, the lover had need be ‘all patience,’ for ’tis a fickle god he woos. If he would not woo in vain, he must bear with a thousand caprices, inconstancies, and tyrannies.
Lovers are proverbially blind to each other’s shortcomings, and their praises of each other are therefore untrammelled by ordinary scruples on the score of veracity. ‘There never,’ says Bacon, ‘was a proud man thought so absurdly well of himself as the lover doth of the person loved.’ It is therefore at once easy and natural for men and women under the influence of the tender passion to present to each other, and to swallow with the keenest relish, a great deal of this kind of food.