the adoration,
sympathy, and affection, of the men. When one of Goethe's characters
says: "My life began at the moment I fell in love with you;" or when
one of Lessing's characters exclaims: "To live apart from her is
inconceivable to me, would be my death"--we still hear the note of
selfishness, but with harmonic overtones that change its quality, the
result of a change in the way of regarding women. Where women are
looked down on as inferiors, as among the ancients, amorous hyperbole
cannot be sincere; it is either nothing but "spruce affectation" or
else an illustration of the power of sensual love. No ancient author
could have written what Emerson wrote in his essay on Love, of the
visitations of a power which

"made the face of nature radiant with purple light, the
morning and the night varied enchantments; when a
single tone of one voice could make the heart bound,
and the most trivial circumstance associated with one
form is put in the amber of memory; when he became all
eye when one was present, and all memory when one was
gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows and
studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of
a carriage.... When the head boiled all night on the
pillow with the generous deed it resolved on.... When
all business seemed an impertinence, and all men and
women running to and fro in the streets, mere
pictures."

THE POWER OF LOVE

In the essay "On the Power of Love," to which I have referred in
another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that
sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly
happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was
ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible.
Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the more
powerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strong
enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in
literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in a
perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love." "The major part
of lovers," writes Robert Burton,

"are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason
counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace,
danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow;
yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs
down on the other."

Profe