te love is perhaps always poignant.

Love disdains pity.

A wounded love carries a scar to the grave.

* * *

In love, when honor is lost, loss of shame soon follows. Then indeed the
downward patch becomes precipitous.

* * *

To some, love never comes; to some, it comes too often; but the same love
never recurs, as never a bud opens twice: happy he or she is who gains
bud, blossom, and fruit. Since

The sweetest love is that wherein the odorous flower of passion ripens
into the nourishing fruitage of affection. But

Love requires careful nature. And

The more exotic the love, the more difficult its culture.--True, An
orchid may life on air. Yes; but how torrid and vaporous an air!

Your sturdy mistletoe thrives on the humble apple; a Cattleya requires a
Columbian forest.

* * *

Youth wonders at the amatory successes of middle-age. Youth knows not
that

In matters amatory, age is no handicap:

A girl in her 'teens will make love to a gentleman of forty--and vice
versa. In fact

The indiscreet impetuosity of youth succumbs before the astuteness of
age.

The bachelor and the spinster both sometimes wonder that the benedick and
the bride are still their rivals; for they know not that

In the amatorial art, matrimony is no handicap. In short,

There is no barrier at which love will balk. Nay more,

Love will forgive anything:

Did love demand it, love, though it might blush, would not blench. And

Often love itself stands amazed at its own divine audacity. Indeed,

Love loves to immolate itself for love. Knowing that

To love, nothing is common or unclean: for

Love, like charity, thinketh no evil. But--remember that

It is only the Uranian Aphrodite (5) that dares essay a divine audacity.
Nevertheless,

Love is the most vulnerable of the emotions, and

A love doubtful of itself would be cautiously accepted: it is not a fact
that

To try to feel one's own pulse, is to make the heart beat irregularly?
So,

To try to see in a mirror the love light in one's own eyes, is to be-dim
it. So, too,

If passion is not linked with affection--woe worth the day when the
troth was plighted! But given passion linked with affection--ah!

Nothing, nothing is criminal to love; for love knows not conscience. Or
rather,

Love upsets all conventional conditions. For

Love creates a world of its own, a world populated by two--and these
make their own laws--or make none. So

A woma