Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/31

 photographers' and print shop windows,— and not be moved, ay, deeply and mysteriously moved, while gazing upon the sorrowful, and yet calm features, had better begin the work of developing heart, for as yet it is ungrown; and whosoever, understandingly, does look upon that portrait, knows more of love than human words are able to convey. The artist who painted the phase of the kingly sentiment there portrayed, and the others who engraved it, must have known not merely love, but love blighted by death, betrayal, or desertion. All men, all women, are full, not only of love to bestow, but of a deathless, unquenchable desire to have love bestowed upon them. Of course, I mean that love which is husbandly, wifely, — blending with that amicive affection which unites friends, allies us to the world of Good, of Use, and of Beauty, and fusing into love of the Creator, as their exhaustions fount and source, — the perpetual well-spring of eternal life and excellence. Perfect love between man and woman is perfect fusion of each, a complete blending of the twain. But love is murdered nowadays; it is constantly sacrificed on the altars of fashion, wealth, selfishness, and something far worse!

I am certain that there is a great deal of mawkish prudery in the world, on the subject of love, that needs correction; and, therefore, lay it down as incontrovertibly true, that nine-tenths of the prostitution of civilization comes of the bad training, hence unhealthy development, of girls. I hold that it will require twenty times the eloquence on the part of a libertine to seduce and ruin a healthy girl that it will to triumph over one that is not healthy — whose eating, drinking, sleeping, work, exercise, play, and dress have been what it should be, from infancy up; and I believe you may preach the moral law till doomsday, and never correct the evil! You forget the body; ignore it entirely, in your earnest search for a girl's best good. Her soul's welfare, and the fevered body stimulant craving, her cramped waist, contracted lungs, fevered stomach, and abnormal craving for excitement, hurl her soul and body also beyond your reach, and the moral law's too; and then you gape, and cry, "Who'd a' thought it," when, if you had kept her well, and taught her young what she should have known, she would have escaped the contaminating influence of solitary vice, withstood temptations of another sort, and have been blooming where now she fades; robust where