Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/160

. . . Beanty is love's signet. Anger and the coarser passions always mar and destroy it. . . . People take care of plants, birds, even pigs, because they know these things else would wither and perish. How very strange, then, that those same good folks take no pains to cultivate the richest plant of all — love! a thing quite as cultivable as violets are, and whose perfume is a great deal sweeter! The Roman Jurisconsult said" Marriage is consent;" at least no tie can be truly valid where such is not the case; hence a hating couple are as truly unmarried by that fact in God's sight as if ten thousand judges had decreed, and a million senates sanctioned, the divorce. Before my writings perish from the earth, the common sense of mankind will sustain the position here advanced. Love is by no means the gay and festive thing a great many noddle-heads fancy it to be ; on the contrary, it is not to be sneered at or laughed about, for it is the most serious and solemn thing on earth, for upon it hinges the happiness or misery of many a human soul; and those who are shallow enough to laugh at and make light of it are not fit for decent human society. How often we hear heartless fools giggling over some one whom they please to call "love-cracked!" Such ninnies are not yet fit to leave the nursery, and need swaddling-clothes still. Women should not forget that a man in love is a very sensitive, if not sensible, creature, prone to fits and starts, and apt to take offence easily. Be careful, then, O woman, and do not, for the sake of displaying your vanity, inflict a wound that may rankle through life, and cause you many a bitter and regretful tear in the coming years. . . . Millions of men have murdered love — sacrificed it on the reeking altar of a beastly lust. Human brutes, these, not men, much less gentlemen! . . . Enduring love is never a one-sided affair. If it is not double and mutual, heaven and earth, all human endeavor, should be practically brought into play to make it so. Let tattlers and fault-finders, gossips and scandalmongers, go to the — dogs, and attend you solely to the increasement of the vital spark between you. . . . What a fool one would be to live outside one's house instead of within it! And yet this very thing is done by married people. They live entirely outside each other's souls, and have "Rooms — unfurnished — to let" inside; and hence come ''crim. con.'' and divorce