100/100 Love

100. Love

"Life without love! Oh, it would be

A world without a sun—

Cold as the snow-capped mountain, dark

As myriad nights in one;

A barren scene, without one spot

Amidst the waste,

Without one blossom of delight,

Of feeling, or of taste!"

Love in one form or another is the ruling element in life. It is the primary source from whence springs all that possesses any real value to man. It may be the love of dominion or power which, though utterly selfish in its aims and methods, has been most marvelously overruled for good in the world's history. It may be the love of knowledge, in the pursuit of which lives have been lost and fortunes spent; but grand secrets have been wrung from nature—secrets which have contributed much for the advancement of human interests. But the love grander than any other, before which all the other elements of civilization pale and dwarf to utter insignificance, which is as powerful to-day as in the morning of time, which will continue to rule until time is ended, is that indefinable, indescribable, ever fresh and beautiful love betwixt man and woman—that love which has the power to tame the savage's heart; which finds man rough, uncultivated, and selfish; which leaves him a refined and courteous gentleman; which transforms the timid, bashful girl to the woman of matchless power for good.

Love is an actual need, an urgent requirement of the heart. Every properly constituted human being who entertains an appreciation of loneliness and wretchedness, and looks forward to happiness and content, feels a necessity of loving. Without it life is unfinished and hope is without aim, nature is defective and man miserable; nor does he come to comprehend the end and glory of existence until he has experienced the fullness of a love that actualizes all indefinite cravings and expectations. Love is the great instrument of nature, the bond and cement of society, the spirit and spring of the universe. It is such an affection as can not so properly be said to be in the soul as the soul to be in that. It is the whole nature wrapped up in one desire. Love is the sun of life, most beautiful in the morning and evening, but warmest and steadiest at noon.

Love blends young hearts in blissful unity, and for the time so ignores past ties and affections as to make a willing separation of the son from his father's house, and the daughter from all the sweet endearments of her childhood's home, to go out together and rear for themselves an altar, around which shall cluster all the cares and delights, the anxieties and sympathies of the family relationship. This love, if pure, unselfish, and discreet, constitutes the chief usefulness and happiness of human life. Without it there would be no organized households, and, consequently, none of that earnest endeavor for a competence and respectability, which is the mainspring to human efforts, none of those sweet, softening, restraining, and elevating influences of domestic life, which can alone fill the earth with the happy influences of refinement.

Love, it has been said, in the common acceptance of the term is folly; but love in its purity, its loftiness, its unselfishness is not only a consequence, but a proof of our moral excellence. The sensibility to moral beauty, the forgetfulness of self in the admiration engendered by it, all prove its claim to a high moral influence. It is the triumph of the unselfish over the selfish part of our nature. No man and no woman can be regarded as complete in their experience of life until they have been subdued into union with the world through their affections. As woman is not woman until she has known love, neither is man a complete man. Both are requisite to each other's completeness.

Love is the weapon which Omnipotence reserved to conquer rebel man when all the rest had failed. Reason he parries; fear he answers blow to blow; future interests he meets with present pleasure; but love, that sun against whose melting beams Winter can not stand, that soft, subduing slumber which brings down the giant, there is not one human soul in a million, not a thousand men in all earth's domain whose earthly hearts are hardened against love. There needs no other proof that happiness is the most wholesome moral atmosphere, and that in which the morality of man is destined ultimately to thrive, than the elevation of soul, the religious aspirations which attend the first assurance, the first sober certainty of true love.

Love is the perpetual melody of humanity. It sheds its effulgence upon youth, and throws a halo around age. It glorifies the present by the light it casts backward, and it lightens the future by the gleams sent forward. The love which is the outcome of esteem has the most elevating and purifying effect on the character. It tends to emancipate one from the slavery of self. It is altogether unsordid; itself is the only price. It inspires gentleness, sympathy, mutual faith, and confidence. True love also in a manner elevates the intellect. "All love renders wise in a degree," says the poet Browning, and the most gifted minds have been the truest lovers. Great souls make all affections great; they elevate and consecrate all true delights. Love even brings to light qualities before lying dormant and unsuspected. It elevates the aspirations, expands the soul, and stimulates the mental powers.

It were fitting that the nature of this affection, which has such power for good or ill, be thoroughly understood, and endeavors made to guide it in right channels. For love, as it is of the first enjoyment, so it is frequently of the deepest distress. If it is placed upon an unworthy object, and the discovery is made too late, the heart can never know peace. Every hour increases the torments of reflection, and hope, that soothes the severest ills, is here turned into deep despair. But, strange to say, though it is one of universal and engrossing interest to humanity, the moralist avoids it, the educator shuns it, and parents taboo it. It is considered almost indelicate to refer to love as between the sexes, and young persons are left to gather their only notions of it from the impossible love stories that fill the shelves of circulating libraries. This strong and absorbing feeling, which nature has for wise purposes made so strong in woman that it colors her whole life and history, though it may form but an episode in the life of man, is usually left to follow its own inclination, and to grow up for the most part unchecked, without any guidance or direction whatever.

Although nature spurns all formal rules and directions in affairs of love; though love triumphs over reason, resists all persuasion, and scorns every dictate of philosophy; and though, like a fabled tree or plant, it may be cut down at night, but ere morning it will be found to have sprouted up again in renewed freshness and beauty, with its leaves and branches re-expanded to the air and laden with blossoms and fruits; still, at all events, it were best to instill in young minds such views of character as should enable them to discriminate between the true and the false, and to accustom them to hold in esteem those qualities of moral purity and integrity without which life is but a scene of folly and misery. It may not be possible to teach young people to love wisely, but they may at least be guarded by parental advice against the frivolous and despicable passions which so often usurp its name.

Genuine love is founded on esteem and respect. You can not long love one for whom you have not these feelings. The most beautiful may be the most admired and caressed, but they are not always the most esteemed and loved. We discover great beauty in those who are not beautiful, if they possess genuine truthfulness, simplicity, and sincerity. No deformity is present where vanity and affectation is absent, and we are unconscious of the want of charms in those who have the power of fascinating us by something more real and permanent than external attractions and transitory shows.

Remember that love is dependent upon forms; courtesy of etiquette must guard and protect courtesy of heart. How many hearts have been lost irrecoverably and how many averted eyes and cold looks have been gained from what seemed, perhaps, but a trifling negligence of forms. Love is a tender plant and can not bear cold neglect. It requires kind acts and thoughtful attentions, one to the other, and thrives at its best only when surrounded by an atmosphere of disinterested courtesy.

The love of woman is a stronger power and a sweeter thing than that of man. Men and women can not be judged by the same rules. There are many radical differences in their affectional natures. Man is the creature of interest and ambition. His nature leads him forth into the struggle and bustle of the great world. Love is but the embellishment of his early life, or a song piped in the interval of the acts. He seeks for fame, for fortune, for space in the world's thoughts, and dominion over his fellow-men. But a woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world; it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her nature seeks for love and kindness. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul in the traffic of affection, and if shipwrecked her case is hopeless, for it is the bankruptcy of a heart.

Woman's love is stronger than man's because she sacrifices more. For every woman is with the food of the heart as with the food of her body; it is possible to exist on a very small quantity, but this small quantity is an absolute necessity. The love of a pure, true woman has brightened some of the darkest scenes in the world's history. It inspires them with courage and incites them to actions utterly foreign to their shrinking dispositions. Who can estimate the value of a woman's affections? Gold can not purchase a gem so precious. In our most cheerless moments, when disappointments and care crowd round the heart, and even the gaunt form of poverty menaces with his skeleton fingers, it gleams round the soul like sunlight in dark places. It follows the prisoner into the gloomy cell, and in the silence of midnight it plays around his heart, and in his dreams he folds to his bosom the form of her who loves him still, though the world has turned coldly from him.

Love purifies the heart from self; it strengthens and ennobles the character, gives higher motives and a nobler aim to every action of life, and makes both man and woman strong, noble, and courageous; and the power to love truly and devotedly is the noblest gift with which a human being can be endowed, but it is a sacred fire and not to be burned before idols. Disinterested love is beautiful and noble. How high will it not rise! How many injuries will it not forgive! What obstacles will it not overcome, and what sacrifices will it not make rather than give up the being upon which it has been once wholly and truthfully fixed!

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know it has begun. A thousand messengers betray it to the eye. Tone, act, attitude, and look, the signals upon the countenance, the electric telegraph of touch, all betray the yielding citadel. And there is nothing holier in this life of ours than the first consciousness of love, the first fluttering of its silken wings, the first rising sound of that wind which is so soon to sweep through the soul to purify or to destroy. Love is thus a power, potent for good, but, debased and corrupted, is as potent for evil. If it brings joys it may also conduce to exquisite anguish. A disappointment in love is more hard to get over than any other; the passion itself so softens and subdues the heart that it disables it from struggling or bearing up against the woes and distresses which befall it. The mind meets with other misfortune in her whole strength; she stands collected within herself and sustains the shock with all the force which is natural to her. But a heart crossed in love has its foundation sapped, and immediately sinks under the weight of accidents that are disagreeable to its favorite passion.

When time brings us to the resting-places of life—and we all expect them, and, in some measure, attain them—when we pause to consider its ways and to study its import, we then look back over the waste ground which we have left behind us. Is a bright spot to be seen there? It is where the star of love has shed its beams. Is there a plant, a flower, or any beautiful thing visible? It is where the smiles and tears of affection have been spent—where some fond eye met our own, some endearing heart was clasped to ours. Take these away and what joy has memory in retrospection, or what delight has hope in future prospects? The bosom which does not feel love is cold; the mind which does not conceive it is dull; the philosophy which does not accept it is false; and the only true religion in the world has pure, reciprocal, and undying love for its basis. The loves that make memory happy and home beautiful are those which form the sunlight of our earlier years; they beam gratefully along the pathway of our mature years, and their radiance lingers till the shadows of death darken them all together.