THE ANXIETY OF THE CAT

to make the captive mouse believe she is not on guard.  She walks away with the utmost indifference.  But let the mouse so much as move its crushed little body, she is upon it with the ferocity of the greatest members of her agile tribe.  So it is with us.  Let our possession escape us, our consternation is complete.  Again the spring uncoils, and again we are madmen.  “A murderous guilt shows not itself more soon than love that would seem hid; love’s night is noon,” says Shakspeare.  “It is better to have loved and lost, than never to have loved at all” sings Tennyson.  “Nothing but real love,” says Lord Lytton, “can repay us for the loss of freedom, the cares and fears of poverty,

THE COLD PITY OF THE WORLD

that we both despise and respect.”  “Love,” says Sir Thomas Overbury, wittily, “is a superstition that doth fear the idol which itself hath made.”  “To reveal its complacence by gifts,” says Mrs. Sigourney, “is one of the native dialects of love.”  “Love is never so blind as when it is to spy faults,” says South.  “Love reckons days for years,” says Dryden, “and every little absence is an age.”  “Where love has once obtained an influence,” observes Plautus dryly, “any flavoring, I believe, will please.”  “That is the true reason of love,” says Goethe, “when we believe that we alone can love, that no one could either have loved so before us, and that no one will love in the same way after us.”

“NO CORD OR CABLE CAN DRAW

so forcibly or bind so fast,” says melancholy Burton, “as love can do with only a single thread.”  “Where there exists the most ardent and true love,” says Valerius Maximus, “it is often better to be united in death than separated in life.”  “A man of sense may love like a madman,” says Rochefoucauld, “but not like a fool.”  Says Addison, who was a bachelor, and knew little about the heart:  “Ridicule, perhaps, is a better expedient against love than sober advice; and I am of the opinion that Hudibras and Don Quixote may be as effectual to cure the extravagance of this passion as any one of the old philosophers.”  “Love lessens woman’s delicacy and increases man’s,” says Richter.  This accords with common observation.  “It makes us proud when our love of a mistress is returned,” says Hazlitt, in a rambling manner; “it ought to make us prouder still when we can love her for herself alone, without the aid of any such selfish reflection.  This is the religion of love.”  All such argument proceeds on the theory that love is a sawing of wood, a digging of potatoes, or some such “emotion,” to be entirely controlled by the will and regulated by the decencies.  “Loving,” says Shakspeare, “goes by haps; some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.”  “The accepted and betrothed lover has lost the wildest charms of his maiden, in her acceptance of him,” says Emerson, again; “she was heaven whilst he pursued her as a star—­she cannot be heaven if she stoops to such a one as he.”  I do not think Emerson has got exactly the right idea of the way a lover feels just there.  Here it is and nearer the truth—­I do not know the author’s name: