CHAPTER LIII.

OF THE VARIOUS WAYS OF GETTING IN LOVE. A CHAPTER CONTAINING SOME USEFUL OBSERVATIONS, AND SOME BEAUTIFUL POETRY.

Let cavillers know, that as the Lord John answered the Queen in that Italian Guazzo, an old, a grave discreet man is fittest to discourse of love-matters; because he hath likely more experience, observed more, hath a more staid judgement, can better discern, resolve, discuss, advise, give better cautions and more solid precepts, better inform his auditors in such a subject, and by reason of his riper years, sooner divert.

BURTON.             

Slips of the tongue are sometimes found very inconvenient by those persons who, owing to some unlucky want of correspondence between their wits and their utterance, say one thing when they mean to say another, or bolt out something which the slightest degree of forethought would have kept unsaid. But more serious mischief arises from that misuse of words which occurs in all inaccurate writers. Many are the men, who merely for want of understanding what they say, have blundered into heresies and erroneous assertions of every kind, which they have afterwards passionately and pertinaciously defended, till they have established themselves in the profession, if not in the belief, of some pernicious doctrine or opinion, to their own great injury and that of their deluded followers, and of the commonwealth.

There may be an opposite fault; for indeed upon the agathokakological globe there are opposite qualities always to be found in parallel degrees, north and south of the equator.

A man may dwell upon words till he becomes at length a mere precisian in speech. He may think of their meaning till he loses sight of all meaning, and they appear as dark and mysterious to him as chaos and outer night. “Death! Grave!” exclaims Goethe's suicide, “I understand not the words!” and so he who looks for its quintessence might exclaim of every word in the dictionary.

They who cannot swim should be contented with wading in the shallows: they who can may take to the deep water, no matter how deep so it be clear. But let no one dive in the mud.

I said that Daniel fell in love with the Burgemeester's Daughter, and I made use of the usual expression because there it was the most appropriate: for the thing was accidental. He himself could not have been more surprized if, missing his way in a fog, and supposing himself to be in the Breedestraat of Leyden where there is no canal, he had fallen into the water;—nor would he have been more completely over head and ears at once.

A man falls in love, just as he falls down stairs. It is an accident,— perhaps, and very probably a misfortune; something which he neither intended, nor foresaw, nor apprehended. But when he runs in love it is as when he runs in debt; it is done knowingly and intentionally; and very often rashly, and foolishly, even if not ridiculously, miserably and ruinously.

Marriages that are made up at watering-places are mostly of this running sort; and there may be reason to think that they are even less likely to lead to—I will not say happiness, but to a very humble degree of contentment,—than those which are a plain business of bargain and sale; for into these latter a certain degree of prudence enters on both sides. But there is a distinction to be made here: the man who is married for mere worldly motives, without a spark of affection on the woman's part, may nevertheless get, in every worldly sense of the word, a good wife; and while English women continue to be what, thank Heaven they are, he is likely to do so: but when a woman is married for the sake of her fortune, the case is altered, and the chances are five hundred to one that she marries a villain, or at best a scoundrel.

Falling in love, and running in love are both, as every body knows, common enough; and yet less so than what I shall call catching love. Where the love itself is imprudent, that is to say where there is some just prudential cause or impediment why the two parties should not be joined together in holy matrimony, there is generally some degree of culpable imprudence in catching it, because the danger is always to be apprehended, and may in most cases be avoided. But sometimes the circumstances may be such as leave no room for censure, even when there may be most cause for compassion; and under such circumstances our friend, though the remembrance of the Burgemeester's daughter was too vivid in his imagination for him ever to run in love, or at that time deliberately to walk into it, as he afterwards did,—under such circumstances I say, he took a severe affection of this kind. The story is a melancholy one, and I shall relate not it in this place.

The rarest, and surely the happiest marriages are between those who have grown in love. Take the description of such a love in its rise and progress, ye thousands and tens of thousands who have what is called a taste for poetry,—take it in the sweet words of one of the sweetest and tenderest of English Poets; and if ye doubt upon the strength of my opinion whether Daniel deserves such praise, ask Leigh Hunt, or the Laureate, or Wordsworth, or Charles Lamb.

Ah! I remember well (and how can I
But evermore remember well) when first
Our flame began, when scarce we knew what was
The flame we felt; when as we sat and sighed
And looked upon each other, and conceived
Not what we ailed,—yet something we did ail;
And yet were well, and yet we were not well,
And what was our disease we could not tell.
Then would we kiss, then sigh, then look: and thus
In that first garden of our simpleness
We spent our childhood. But when years began
To reap the fruit of knowledge, ah how then
Would she with graver looks, with sweet stern brow,
Check my presumption and my forwardness;
Yet still would give me flowers, still would me show
What she would have me, yet not have me know.

Take also the passage that presently follows this; it alludes to a game which has long been obsolete,—but some fair reader I doubt not will remember the lines when she dances next.

And when in sport with other company
Of nymphs and shepherds we have met abroad,
How would she steal a look, and watch mine eye
Which way it went? And when at Barley-break
It came unto my turn to rescue her,
With what an earnest, swift and nimble pace
Would her affection make her feet to run,
And further run than to my hand! her race
Had no stop but my bosom, where no end.
And when we were to break again, how late
And loth her trembling hand would part with mine;
And with how slow a pace would she set forth
To meet the encountering party who contends
To attain her, scarce affording him her fingers' ends!1

1 HYMEN'S TRIUMPH.