her is inconceivable to me, would be my death”—­we still hear the note of selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the result of a change in the way of regarding women.  Where women are looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but “spruce affectation” or else an illustration of the power of sensual love.  No ancient author could have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of the visitations of a power which

“made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage....  When the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved on....  When all business seemed an impertinence, and all men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.”

THE POWER OF LOVE

In the essay “On the Power of Love,” to which I have referred in another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible.  Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the more powerful of the two passions.  However this may be, either is strong enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, “speaking in a perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love.”  “The major part of lovers,” writes Robert Burton,

“are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace, danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow; yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs down on the other.”

Professor Bain, discussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600 pages, declares, regarding love (138), that

“the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of youthful sensations and ungratified desires is probably the most furious and elated experience of human nature.”

In whatever sense we take this, as referring to sensual or sentimental love, or a combination of the two, it explains why erotic writers of all times make such lavish use of superlatives and exaggerations.  Their strong feelings can only be expressed in strong language.  “Beauty inflicts a wound sharper than any arrow,” quoth Achilles Tatius.  Meleager declares:  “Even the winged Eros in the air became your prisoner, sweet Timarion, because