question when I began my
task.

"It has often been remarked that in Cicero's letters and those of
Pliny the younger there are unmistakable indications of sympathy
with the more sentimental feeling of modern days. I find in them
tones of deep tenderness only, such as have arisen and will arise
from sad and aching hearts in every land and every age."

A. v. HUMBOLDT. Cosmos II. P. 19.

This opinion of our great scholar is one with which I cheerfully
coincide and would refer my readers to the fact that love-stories were
written before the Christian era: the Amor and Psyche of Apuleius for
instance. Indeed love in all its forms was familiar to the ancients.
Where can we find a more beautiful expression of ardent passion than
glows in Sappho's songs? or of patient faithful constancy than in
Homer's Penelope? Could there be a more beautiful picture of the union
of two loving hearts, even beyond the grave, than Xenophon has preserved
for us in his account of Panthea and Abradatas? or the story of Sabinus
the Gaul and his wife, told in the history of Vespasian? Is there
anywhere a sweeter legend than that of the Halcyons, the ice-birds, who
love one another so tenderly that when the male becomes enfeebled by
age, his mate carries him on her outspread wings whithersoever he will;
and the gods, desiring to reward such faithful love, cause the sun to
shine more kindly, and still the winds and waves on the "Halcyon days"
during which these birds are building their nest and brooding over their
young? There can surely have been no lack of romantic love in days when
a used-up man of the world, like Antony, could desire in his will that
wherever he died his body might be laid by the side of his beloved
Cleopatra: nor of the chivalry of love when Berenice's beautiful hair
was placed as a constellation in the heavens. Neither can we believe
that devotion in the cause of love could be wanting when a whole
nation was ready to wage a fierce and obstinate war for the sake of one
beautiful woman. The Greeks had an insult to revenge, but the Trojans
fought for the possession of Helen. Even the old men of Ilium were ready
"to suffer long for such a woman." And finally is not the whole question
answered in Theocritus' unparalleled poem, "the Sorceress?" We see the
poor love-lorn girl and her old woman-servant, Thestylis, cowering over
the fire above which the bird supposed to possess the power of bringing
back t