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30 They had not spoken, but they felt allured,

As if their souls and lips each other beckoned,

Which, being joined, like swarming bees they clung—

Their hearts the flowers from whence the honey sprung.

The kiss of love is the exultant message of the longing of love, love eternally young, the burning prayer of hot desire, which is born on the lovers' lips, and "rises," as Charles Fuster has said, "up to the blue sky from the green plains," like a tender, trembling thank-offering.

The love kiss, rich in promise, bestows an intoxicating feeling of infinite happiness, courage, and youth, and therefore surpasses all other earthly joys in sublimity—at any rate all poets say so—and no one has expressed it in more exquisite and choicer words than Alfred de Musset in his celebrated sonnet on Tizianello:

Beatrix Donato was the soft sweet name

Of her whose earthly form was shaped so fair;

A faithful heart lay in her breast's white frame,

Her spotless body held a mind most rare.