have this sort of affection are patriotic and stanch. The advantage of love of this nature is that it is rarely unprofitably disposed. A man may love a woman, or a woman a man, and the result be a bad investment. The world is full of the mistakes of love, and it is probable that more is thrown away than is bestowed on worthy and reciprocated objects.
Steer clear of burning love. There is danger in it. It is apt, like bad company, to have evil communications.
The way we love, or judge others who do, or think they do, very often depends upon our own moral and spiritual health, and this latter often results from our physical condition.
A touch of dyspepsia, growing out of pig's foot swallowed at midnight, has changed a man's whole life, and an irregularity of the bile has made many an angel almost a fiend. If the gastric juice is all right, and the blood in swimming order, the world is a nice, bright, pleasant place, and from which nobody is in a hurry to move; but if, in that queer, mysterious fluid, there is any alloy, the sky of life is all cloud, the winds howl, and everything is dark and dismal. If you want to feel happy, look after your digestive and circulating systems.
My heart, I bid thee answer,
How are Love's triumphs wrought?
Two hearts to one pulse beating,
Two spirits to one thought!
Tell me how Love Cometh.
It comes unsought—unsent.
Now tell me how Love goeth.
It was not Love that went.
And to enable my readers to discriminate between true love and its counterfeits, is partly why I write this book.
Promiscuous love,—freedom in that intimate relation is moral, social, physical, and psychical suicide; that's all. Proof,—look at the victims of it on every hand.
I shall have occasion to recur to this branch of the subject again; meantime a word or two about vampires, conscious and unconscious; and in treating upon that painful and woe-freighted phase of this holy theme, I shall speak also of it in its higher and nobler aspects. . . . . Whoever can look unmoved upon the picture of "Evangeline,"—to be seen almost everywhere in
