ailing, and wasting away from some cause
the physicians who had already seen her were unable to make out. The
shrewd old practitioner suspected that love was at the bottom of the
young lady's malady. Many relatives and friends of both sexes, all of
them ready with their sympathy, came to see her. The physician sat by
her bedside during one of these visits, and in an easy, natural way took
her hand and placed a finger on her pulse. It beat quietly enough until
a certain comely young gentleman entered the apartment, when it suddenly
rose infrequency, and at the same moment her hurried breathing, her
changing color, pale and flushed by turns, betrayed the profound
agitation his presence excited. This was enough for the sagacious Greek;
love was the disease, the cure of which by its like may be claimed as an
anticipation of homoeopathy. In the frontispiece to the fine old 'Junta'
edition of the works of Galen, you may find among the wood-cuts
a representation of the interesting scene, with the title Amantas
Dignotio,--the diagnosis, or recognition, of the lover.

"Love has many languages, but the heart talks through all of them. The
pallid or burning cheek tells of the failing or leaping fountain which
gives it color. The lovers at the 'Brookside' could hear each other's
hearts beating. When Genevieve, in Coleridge's poem, forgot herself, and
was beforehand with her suitor in her sudden embrace,

"'T was partly love and partly fear,
And partly 't was a bashful art,
That I might rather feel than see
The swelling of her heart'

"Always the heart, whether its hurried action is seen, or heard, or
felt. But it is not always in this way that the 'deceitful' organ treats
the lover.

"'Faint heart never won fair lady.'

"This saying was not meant, perhaps, to be taken literally, but it
has its literal truth. Many a lover has found his heart sink within
him,--lose all its force, and leave him weak as a child in his emotion
at the sight of the object of his affections. When Porphyro looked upon
Madeline at her prayers in the chapel, it was too much for him:

"'She seemed a splendid angel, newly drest,
Save wings, for heaven:--Porphyro grew faint,
She knelt, so pure a thing, so free from earthly taint.'

"And in Balzac's novel, 'Cesar Birotteau,' the hero of the story
'fainted away for-joy at the moment when, under a linden-tree, at
Sceaux, Constance-Barbe-Josephine accepted him as her future husband.'