Leah was
tender-eyed; but Rachel was beautiful and well-favored.
And Jacob loved Rachel; and said, I will serve thee
seven years for Rachel thy younger daughter. And Laban
said, It is better that I give her to thee, than that I
should give her to another man: abide with me. And
Jacob served seven years for Rachel; and they seemed
unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her,'
It may be said that after marriage Jacob's love was not
of the modern conjugal type; but certainly his
pre-matrimonial passion was self-sacrificing, enduring,
and hopeful enough for a mediaeval romance. The
courtship of Ruth and Boaz is a bold and pretty
love-story, which details the scheme of an old widow
and a young widow for the capture of a wealthy kinsman.
The Song of Solomon is, on the surface, a wonderful
love-poem. But it is needless to multiply illustrations
from this source."

A Chicago critic declared that it would be easy to show that from the
moment when Adam said,

"This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called woman, because she was taken out of
man. Therefore shall a man leave his father and his
mother, and cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one
flesh"

--from that moment unto this day "that which it pleases our author to
call romantic love has been substantially one and the same thing....
Has this writer never heard of Isaac and Rebekah; of Jacob and
Rachel?" A Philadelphia reviewer doubted whether I believed in my own
theory because I ignored in my chapter on love among the Hebrews "the
story of Jacob and Rachel and other similar instances of what deserves
to be called romantic love among the Hebrews." Professor H.O. Trumbull
emphatically repudiates my theory in his _Studies in Oriental Social
Life_ (62-63); proceeding:

"Yet in the very first book of the Old Testament
narrative there appears the story of young Jacob's
romantic love for Rachel, a love which was inspired by
their first meeting [Gen. 29: 10-18] and which was
afresh and tender memory in the patriarch Jacob's mind
when long years after he had buried her in Canaan [Gen.
35: 16-20] he was on his deathbed in Egypt [Gen. 48:
1-7]. In all the literature of romantic love in all the
ages there can be found no more touching exhibit of the
true-hearted fidelity of a roma