Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/150

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Affectional Alchemy.
145

there's love trouble in the soul, and love the only remedy. In his case insanity more or less pronounced, and enduring.

CXXV. There are periods when love insists upon passional moods. It is its natural appeasement. If not yielded to, a frightful train of ills are sure to follow, and madness may end the cruel scene.

CXXVI. Jealousy quite as often springs from magnetic incompatibility and impotence as from love-estrayal; and it brings on heart-pain, dyspepsia, liver and Bright's disease, prostatic, urethral, vaginal, ovarian, and other fatal troubles, long before the allotted span of years run out.

CXXVII. Doctors tell us that actual marriage will cure some diseases of woman. But a diseased woman is not fit for it; and actual marriage in diseased states of either party is—monstrous! The doctrine is nonsense, pure and simple. Magnetism may do. marriage no! But facts are facts, and the thing occurs. If love underlie it, well and good; if not, then not. It is disastrous. But if good results follow, it is Affection that works the miracle, nothing coarser! And more wives are injured in that manner than sextons can find spades to dig graves for!

That is a very poor sort of love which always exacts but never gives! "She prated of Love all day long, and neglected by one single act to prove her truth," is the story of many a man's life. "He says he loves me—but just look at me; does love waste one as I am wasted? My God! Let this bitter cup pass from me!" is the daily cry of millions of "Married" women!

I'm tired and sick of dead babies! They ought to fill out the term of threescore years and ten; but they don't; and those who escape the sewers, sinks, drains, and being carried out with the tides, or being snugly put away in a cigar-box and stuck in a hole in the garden, are mighty uncertain of a safe deliverance from measles, scarlatina, croup, paregoric, or Mrs. Winslow's soothing syrup! Ah, but isn't it a soother?—soothing mam a one to a sleep that knows no waking! But these dead ones are not all the oil-spring of the riff-raff, or haul-handed servitors at labor's shrine; but many a hundred of them might lay claim to aristocratic lineage;