or in Juliet’s

     Good-night! good-night! parting is such sweet sorrow,
     That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.

This mysterious mixture of moods, constantly maintained through the alternations of hope and doubt, elation and despair,

     And hopes, and fears that kindle hope,
     An undistinguishable throng

as Coleridge puts it; or

     Where hot and cold, where sharp and sweet,
     In all their equipages meet;
     Where pleasures mixed with pains appear,
     Sorrow with joy, and hope with fear

as Swift rhymes it, is thus seen to be one of the essential and most characteristic ingredients of modern romantic love.

COURTSHIP AND IMAGINATION

Here, again, the question confronts us, How far down among the strata of human life can we find traces of this ingredient of love?  Do we find it among the Eskimos, for instance?  Nansen relates (II., 317), that

“In the old Greenland days marriage was a simple and speedy affair.  If a man took a fancy to a girl, he merely went to her home or tent, caught her by the hair or anything else which offered a hold, and dragged her off to his dwelling without further ado.”

Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious “courtship” was perpetrated by proxy!  The details regarding the marriage customs of lower races already cited in this volume, with the hundreds more to be given in the following pages, cannot fail to convince the reader that primitive courtship—­where there is any at all—­is habitually a “simple and speedy affair”—­not always as simple and speedy as with Nansen’s Greenlanders, but too much so to allow of the growth and play of those mixed emotions which agitate modern swains.  Fancy the difference between the African of Yariba who, as Lander tells us (I., 161), “thinks as little of taking a wife as of cutting an ear of corn,” and the modern lover who suffers the tortures of the inferno because a certain girl frowns on him, while her smiles may make him so happy that he would not change places with a king, unless his beloved were to be queen.  Savages cannot experience such extremes of anguish and rapture, because they have no imagination.  It is only when the imagination comes into play that we can look for the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, that help to make up the sum and substance of romantic love.

EFFECTS OF SENSUAL LOVE

At the same time it would be a great mistake to assume that the manifestation of mixed moods proves the presence of romantic love.  After all, the alternation of hope and despair which produces those bitter-sweet paradoxes of the varying and mixed emotions, is one of the selfish aspects of passion:  the lover fears or hopes for himself, not for the other.  There is, therefore, no reason why we