* * *

The recurrence of a love is a great shock to love.  Love thinks itself a think unique, unalterable, supreme; a thing not made out of the flux and change of earthly affairs, but heaven-born and descended from the skies; that it should go and come seems to destroy the fundamental conception of love.

* * *

The affianced man thinks he has won him the sweetest, the most sacrosanct thing that ever trode God’s earth outside of Eden:  a bundle of blisses, a compact little mass of exquisite mysteries, whose every tint and curve and motion are to him sources of wonderment and delight; he is at once humbled and exalted; he thanks high Heaven for the gift; for that comport himself worthy of such gift; for that this wondrous and mysterious little thing called “a woman” should of her own accord put herself in his arms, to be by him and by him alone cherished and nurtured till death them do part—­this indeed gives the mail heart a very sobering, a very ennobling thrill; for beneath the heaving breast he so passionately loves, behind the eyes into the depths of which he so passionately looks, there stirs, he knows, that ineffable, that indefinable thing, a woman’s heart; and that to him has been committed the keeping of that heart—­this rouses in him the manly virtues as no other thing rouses them.  Strong is the man who can live up to these emotions; sage the woman who knows what she has aroused.

* * *

The philanderer or the flirt—­to whom love-making and love-taking have been a pasttime—­is appalled at the seriousness of love when real love is offered him or her.  For often enough

The philanderer or the flirt thinks compliments and cajolery the food of love:  in time they discover that love is a veritable sarcophagus!

* * *

Many an accepted lover (both masculine and feminine) tries to make up for coldness of passion by warmness of affection:  a subterfuge of dubious efficacy.  For though

Affection seeks affection, passion is only appeased by passion.  Yet

When one loves passionately, and the other languidly accepts, it is well perhaps for that other sometimes to be a little “unfaithful to the truth” (1) and to simulate an unfelt ardor.  But, always this is of questionable value, for

Love abhors simulation of anything even of ardor.

(1) Tennyson, “Love and Duty”.

* * *

If mutual confidence is not established at the moment of betrothal, it will never afterwards be established.  And

Woeful will be the plight of those between whom mutual confidence is not then established.  For

Mutual confidence is the only atmosphere in which love can breathe.

* * *

An engaged man, like a hungry man, is an irascible man.  And How often a fiancee is sore put to it, not only to satisfy him, but to pacify him!

* * *

A woman will often blandly ask why the two rivals to her hand should not be friends!  Yet it is significant of much that she does her utmost to keep them apart!  Indeed,