have loved at
all.

"Better for all that some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes."

How can love be the be-all and the end-all of life with us, when
steam-looms and litigation, railway shares and big bonanzas, cotton
and corn, literature and art, politics and dry goods, and a thousand
other interests share our affections and attentions? It is impossible
that our life should be the mere machinery of a love plot; it is
rather a drama in which love is simply one of the _dramatis personae_.

This fact is well understood, even if not acknowledged in words; the
sighs and the fevers, the hoarding of flowers and gloves, the broken
hearts and shattered lives, all for the sake of one sweet face, still
exist in literature, but not much in life. Lovers of to-day are more
given to considering how to make housekeeping as easy as matrimony
than to writing sonnets to their mistresses' eyebrows. The very
devotion of ancient times would now be tedious, its long protestations
a bore, and we lovers of the nineteenth century would be very apt to
yawn in the very face of a sixteenth-century Cupid. Let the modern
lover try one of Amadis' long speeches to his lady, and she would
likely answer, "Don't be tiresome, Jack; let us go to Thomas' and hear
the music and eat an ice-cream."

Is love, then, in a state of decay? By no means--it has merely
accommodated itself to the spirit of the age; and this spirit demands
that the lives of men shall be more affected by Hymen than by Cupid.
Lovers interest society now solely as possible husbands and wives,
fathers and mothers of the republic. Lord Lytton points out this fact
as forcibly exemplified in our national dramas. Every one feels the
love scenes in a play, the sentimental dialogues of the lovers,
fatiguing; but a matrimonial quarrel excites the whole audience, and
it sheds its pleasantest tears over their reconciliation. For few
persons in any audience ever have made, or ever will make, love as
poets do; but the majority have had, or will have, quarrels and
reconciliations with their wives.

"Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them--but not
for love;" and if this was true of Shakespeare's times, it is doubly
so of ours. If there ever was any merit in dying for love, we fail to
see it; occasionally a man will wildly admit that he is making a fool
of himself for this or that woman, but though we may pity him, we
don't respect him for such a course. Women, st