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Love

from Essays: First Series (1841)

"I was as a gem concealed;

Me my burning ray revealed."

Koran

Every promise of the soul has innumerable fulfilments; each ofnt. Nature, uncontainable,

flowing, forelooking, in the first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence

which shall lose all particular regards in its general light. The introduction to this felicity is in

a private and tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment of human life; which,

like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works a

revolution in his mind and body; unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and

civic relations, carries him with new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the senses,

opens the imagination, adds to his character heroic and sacred attributes, establishes

marriage, and gives permanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with the heyday of the blood seems to

require, that in order to portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should confess

to be true to their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The delicious fancies of

youth reject the least savour of a mature philosophy, as chilling with age and pedantry their

purple bloom. And, therefore, I know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and

stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament of Love. But from these

formidable censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this passion of

which we speak, though it begin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no

one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged participators of it, not less than

the tender maiden, though in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that, kindling its first

embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of

another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men

and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature

with its generous flames. It matters not, therefore, whether we attempt to describe the

passion at twenty, at thirty, or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period will lose

some of its later, he who paints it at the last, some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped

that, by patience and the Muses' aid, we may attain to that inward view of the law, which

shall describe a truth ever young and beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to the

eye, at whatever angle beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to facts,

and study the sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. For each man sees his

own life defaced and disfigured, as the life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man sees

over his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal.

Let any man go back to those delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which

have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment, he will shrink and moan. Alas! I know

not why, but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances of budding

joy, and cover every beloved name. Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the

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intellect, or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience. Details are melancholy; the plan is

seemly and noble. In the actual world — the painful kingdom of time and place — dwell care,

and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round

it all the Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and the partial interests of to-

day and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations

usurps in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any worthy person so

much, as how he has sped in the history of this sentiment? What books in the circulating

libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion, when the story is told with

any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of life, like any

passage betraying affection between two parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and

never shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep

emotion, and we are no longer strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest

interest in the development of the romance. All mankind love a lover. The earliest

demonstrations of complacency and kindness are nature's most winning pictures. It is the

dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The rude village boy teases the girls

about the school-house door; — but to-day he comes running into the entry, and meets one

fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her books to help her, and instantly it seems to him

as if she removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred precinct. Among the throng

of girls he runs rudely enough, but one alone distances him; and these two little

neighbours, that were so close just now, have learned to respect each other's personality. Or

who can avert his eyes from the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls who

go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour

about nothing with the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village they are on a

perfect equality, which love delights in, and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate

nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may have little beauty, yet plainly

do they establish between them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding relations,

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what with their fun and their earnest, about Edgar, and Jonas, and Almira, and who was

invited to the party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when the singing-school

would begin, and other nothings concerning which the parties cooed. By and by that boy

wants a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere and sweet mate,

without any risk such as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told, that in some public discourses of mine my reverence for the intellect has

made me unjustly cold to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the

remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are love's world, and the coldest

philosopher cannot recount the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the

power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as treasonable to nature, aught derogatory

to the social instincts. For, though the celestial rapture falling out of heaven seizes only upon

those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison, and

putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty years, yet the

remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers

on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may seem to many men, in revising their

experience, that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious memory of

some passages wherein affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing the deep

attraction of its own truth to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances. In looking

backward, they may find that several things which were not the charm have more reality to

this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed them. But be our experience in

particulars what it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that power to his heart and

brain, which created all things new; which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art;

which made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the morning and the night varied

enchantments; when a single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and the most

trivial circumstance associated with one form is put in the amber of memory; when he

became all eye when one was present, and all memory when one was gone; when the youth

becomes a watcher of windows, and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a

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carriage; when no place is too solitary, and none too silent, for him who has richer company

and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts, than any old friends, though best and purest,

can give him; for the figures, the motions, the words of the beloved object are not like other

images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, "enamelled in fire," and make the study of

midnight.

"Thou art not gone being gone, where'er thou art,

Thou leav'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy loving heart."

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at the recollection of days when

happiness was not happy enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for

he touched the secret of the matter, who said of love, —

"All other pleasures are not worth its pains";

and when the day was not long enough, but the night, too, must be consumed in keen

recollections; when the head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous deed it

resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing fever, and the stars were letters, and the

flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed an

impertinence, and all the men and women running to and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes all things alive and significant. Nature

grows conscious. Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his heart and soul. The

notes are almost articulate. The clouds have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the

forest, the waving grass, and the peeping flowers have grown intelligent; and he almost

fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and

sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men.

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"Fountain-heads and pathless groves,

Places which pale passion loves,

Moonlight walks, when all the fowls

Are safely housed, save bats and owls,

A midnight bell, a passing groan, —

These are the sounds we feed upon."

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a palace of sweet sounds and sights; he

dilates; he is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he accosts the grass

and the trees; he feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and the lily in his veins; and he

talks with the brook that wets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural beauty have made him love music

and verse. It is a fact often observed, that men have written good verses under the

inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It expands the sentiment; it makes the

clown gentle, and gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject it will infuse a

heart and courage to defy the world, so only it have the countenance of the beloved object.

In giving him to another, it still more gives him to himself. He is a new man, with new

perceptions, new and keener purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims. He

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does not longer appertain to his family and society; _he_ is somewhat; _he_ is a person;

_he_ is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over

the human youth. Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome as the sun

wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems

sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to his fancy poor and solitary. Like a

tree in flower, so much soft, budding, informing love-liness is society for itself, and she

teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her

existence makes the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons from his attention as

cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies him by carrying out her own being into somewhat

impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands to him for a representative of all

select things and virtues. For that reason, the lover never sees personal resemblances in his

mistress to her kindred or to others. His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her

sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no resemblance except to summer

evenings and diamond mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm

which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of

tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this

wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to

organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in

society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of

transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and fore-show. We

cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and

evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow

character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter

signify, when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my

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endless life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency may be observed in every

work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible,

when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and

measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the

act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition _from_

that which is representable to the senses, _to_ that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a

stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry, the success is not attained when it

lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the

unattainable. Concerning it, Landor inquires "whether it is not to be referred to some purer

state of sensation and existence."

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with

any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and

not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot

feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the

firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say so, because we feel that

what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which

you know not in yourself, and can never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty which the ancient writers delighted in;

for they said that the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming up and down in

quest of that other world of its own, out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by

the light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other objects than those of this world,

which are but shadows of real things. Therefore, the Deity sends the glory of youth before

the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies as aids to its recollection of the celestial

good and fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female sex runs to her, and finds

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the highest joy in contemplating the form, movement, and intelligence of this person,

because it suggests to him the presence of that which indeed is within the beauty, and the

cause of the beauty.

If, however, from too much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross, and

misplaced its satisfaction in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being unable to

fulfil the promise which beauty holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and

suggestions which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes through the body, and falls to

admire strokes of character, and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses and

their actions, then they pass to the true palace of beauty, more and more inflame their love

of it, and by this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun puts out the fire by shining

on the hearth, they become pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in itself

excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these

nobilities, and a quicker apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them in one to

loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to

the society of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his mate, he attains a clearer

sight of any spot, any taint, which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is able to

point it out, and this with mutual joy that they are now able, without offence, to indicate

blemishes and hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and comfort in curing the

same. And, beholding in many souls the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each

soul that which is divine from the taint which it has contracted in the world, the lover

ascends to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this

ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor

is it new. If Plato, Plutarch, and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and Milton. It

awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence which

presides at marriages with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is

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prowling in the cellar, so that its gravest discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs.

Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education of young women, and withers the

hope and affection of human nature, by teaching that marriage signifies nothing but a

housewife's thrift, and that woman's life has no other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one scene in our play. In the procession of

the soul from within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble thrown into the

pond, or the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest,

on every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the house, and yard, and passengers,

on the circle of household acquaintance, on politics, and geography, and history. But things

are ever grouping themselves according to higher or more interior laws. Neighbourhood,

size, numbers, habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over us. Cause and effect, real

affinities, the longing for harmony between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive,

idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the step backward from the higher to the lower

relations is impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of persons, must become

more impersonal every day. Of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden

who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms, with eyes so full of mutual

intelligence, of the precious fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external

stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf-buds. From

exchanging glances, they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to

plighting troth, and marriage. Passion beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly

embodied, and the body is wholly ensouled.

"Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,

That one might almost say her body thought."

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Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair,

has no other aim, asks no more, than Juliet, — than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents,

kingdoms, religion, are all contained in this form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The

lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When

alone, they solace themselves with the remembered image of the other. Does that other see

the same star, the same melting cloud, read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now

delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and, adding up costly advantages, friends,

opportunities, properties, exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would give all as a

ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the

lot of humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain arrive to them, as to all. Love

prays. It makes covenants with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union which is

thus effected, and which adds a new value to every atom in nature, for it transmutes every

thread throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray, and bathes the soul in a new

and sweeter element, is yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls, poetry,

protestations, nor even home in another heart, content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It

arouses itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on the harness, and aspires

to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude,

detects incongruities, defects, and disproportion in the behaviour of the other. Hence arise

surprise, expostulation, and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was signs of

loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are there, however eclipsed. They appear and

reappear, and continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign, and attaches to the

substance. This repairs the wounded affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game

of permutation and combination of all possible positions of the parties, to employ all the

resources of each, and acquaint each with the strength and weakness of the other. For it is

the nature and end of this relation, that they should represent the human race to each other.

All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly wrought into the texture

of man, of woman.

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"The person love does to us fit,

Like manna, has the taste of all in it."

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that inhabit this temple of the

body appear at the windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they are

united. If there be virtue, all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once

flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and, losing in violence what it gains in

extent, it becomes a thorough good understanding. They resign each other, without

complaint, to the good offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge

in time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its object, for a

cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or absent, of each other's designs. At

last they discover that all which at first drew them together,— those once sacred features,

that magical play of charms, — was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by

which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and the heart, from year to

year, is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly above their

consciousness. Looking at these aims with which two persons, a man and a woman, so

variously and correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society

forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this

crisis from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial

bower, and nature, and intellect, and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they

bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person, nor partiality, but

which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We

are by nature observers, and thereby learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often

made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night. Though slowly and with pain, the

objects of the affections change, as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the

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affections rule and absorb the man, and make his happiness dependent on a person or

persons. But in health the mind is presently seen again, — its overarching vault, bright with

galaxies of immutable lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us as clouds,

must lose their finite character and blend with God, to attain their own perfection. But we

need not fear that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul. The soul may be

trusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as these relations must be

succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and so on for ever.

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