All hail, we sing, for hail is ice in chunks,
And Mary’s kisses are but chunks of ice.
Brittle and snappy, with no sign of thaw,
Or warmth that meets and pins two souls
Together at the touch of lips.
There is a story told of a light, free-hearted Western girl—probably auburn-haired—who, while engaged in the osculatory performance with her lover, swooped down upon him like a summer fog upon a millstone and scooped him in. She sat in his lap and kissed him with a kissness which an emotional actress would have given ten years of her life to imitate upon the stage. It was an earthquake of love, a simoon of affection. She kissed him until his back hair smoked.
It is said that in nearly all the famous colleges for women there is a special teacher or doctress in physiology, and in the so-called oral recitations the pernicious effects of osculation are considered at great length. By way of tolerating what seems to be a necessary evil, various theories are advanced and various provisions advocated. The girl who comes from Smith College, Northampton, kisses on the oblique lines that fall from the left corner of your mouth, but when kissed, is so adroit in the way she jerks her head, that the point of salutation may be found on a radius from the right of her demure little mouth. The Vassar graduate kisses more than her Smith College friend, but the chin is her choice, as you will observe in an attempt to salute her. The seniors from Wellesley press their kisses high up on the face, almost under the sweep of the eyelash, and the Lake Forest and Harvard Annex maidens kiss at a point equally distant from the nose and ear.
Very peculiar is the kiss of the female cornetist. A young man who had attended a concert gives his experience. “I had known her in childhood, when we together hunted the same schoolmaster with bean-blowers, and at the conclusion of her cornet solo I greeted her for the first time in several years. Of course we kissed each other impulsively. Good heavens! That was my mental exclamation. I felt as though I had been hit with brass knuckles or smacked by a cast-iron image. I instinctively pressed my handkerchief to my benumbed mouth, and looked for the weapon with which I had been assaulted. It was the girl’s kiss, however, that I had felt. Good playing on the cornet depends upon the amount of inflexibility which can be imparted to the upper lip. Hers had become fairly adamantine.”
There is the “life-teeming kiss,” and, on the other hand, there is the Platonic kiss.
But what Platonic kisses were