Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/154

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
Affectional Alchemy.
149

amicive than ardent and amative. Negro Love is diffusive, hilarious, sensual. Oriental Love is sad-eyed, dreamy, vague, skyey, poetic, rapt, heavenly, divine, but not keen, or passional. Spanish Love is fiery, ardent, impetuous, terrible, scorching, consuming; tender, but not enduring. German Love is parental, maternal, filial, domestic, dead-level, and mainly physical. It has no Italian heights; no sunbursts; no mountains or valleys; no anguish; no great joys; no hill-tops crowned with glittering sheen. French Love is superficial, lascivious, and, when youth is gone, a thing of memory, not of fact. English Love, like its food and architecture, is solid, lasting, nourishing, life-prolonging, good to have, but has no extremes. Scotch Love is domestic, but mealy. Northern Love is like that of the felidæ—catty, scratchy, periodic, poisonish, often downright brutal, and never tender, delicate, or refined. Yankee Love is fitful, uncertain, changeful, passional, moody, seldom more than superficial, because the Yankee faculties are all engrossed in the one grand object of American life—dollars and dimes, dash and display. Western Love I know but little about, and, judging from what I saw in Ohio, is so-so-ish, not deep; cool, calculating, and seldom drives its victims to suicide, because only the heartful sink to despair!

Lastly. Southern Love is volcanic, chivalrous, gallant, true, tender, jealous, safe when earnest, devotional and devoted, genuine and manly. The well-bred Southerners are the true ladies and gentlemen of America! I never met but one mean man among them in all my life (and he was descended from a French family, born in Limerick, or the Cove of Cork). They have less sharp intellect, perhaps, than the northern people, but more Soul; hence, while subject to fevers, amative weakness they are free from!

CXXIX. An old man should be very careful of the intimacies of wedded life; he should change his amative for amicive ardor; because all old people arc more or less troubled with Embolism,—a clogging of the veins, nerves, arteries, muscles—all the viscera, with the limy, chalky, carbonaceous, calcareous refuse of the body—such as the organs cannot get rid of; and the accumulation means a cessation of physical joys and vigor, and ultimate death. When Embolism prevails to a considerable extent, the orgasm is a danger-