She, with sunset kisses, sucked the wasting breath
Out of his lips, like lilies pale and soft.
When Lord Nelson was dying on board his flagship, he took leave of his faithful friend, Hardy, by kissing him. “Kiss me, Hardy!” he said, and these were the last words he uttered. And so, too, Sir Walter Scott, when dying, kissed Lockhart, saying, “Be good, my dear! be good.”
Many famous kisses might be mentioned. It is recorded in the book of Genesis that when Jacob kissed Rachel he “lifted up his voice and wept.” One of the funny writers has attempted to account for his weeping. He gives, among other reasons, that he wept because it was not time to kiss her again; because Rachel threatened to tell her ma; he wept because the damsel did not kiss him; he thought she was fast colors, and cried when the paint came off; when he lifted up his voice, he found it heavy, and could not get it so high as he intended; he wept because Rachel encouraged him to kiss her twice more, and he was afraid to do it; finally, he wept because his first enjoyment of the most delightful pleasure of life overcame him.
Duncan Mackenzie, a veteran of Waterloo, who died at Elgin, Scotland, in 1866, delighted in relating how he kissed the duchess in taking the shilling from between her teeth to become one of her regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, better known as the Ninety-second. The old Scottish veteran has not one left behind him to tell the same tale about kissing the blue-eyed duchess in the market-place of Dutkill.
There is a famous kiss in the “Beggar’s Opera.” It was given by Macbeth to Jenny Diver, and the unpleasant effect which it produced on him may be judged from the sarcastic remark: “One may know by your kiss that the gin is excellent.”
Petruchio gave his bride a kiss of enormous calibre. We are told that he “kist her lips with such a clamorous smack, that at the parting all the church echoed.” Tennyson speaks of the kiss given to Fatima by her lover:
Once he drew
With one long kiss my whole soul through
My lips—as sunlight drinketh dew.