Love by Emerson

Love !

Every promise of the soul has innumerable

fulfilments; each of its joys ripens into a new want.

Nature, uncontainable, flowing, forelooking, in the

first sentiment of kindness anticipates already a benevolence

which shall lose all particular regards in its general

light. The introduction to this felicity is in a private and

tender relation of one to one, which is the enchantment

of human life; which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm,

seizes on man at one period and works a revolution

in his mind and body; unites him to his race, pledges

him to the domestic and civic relations, carries him with

new sympathy into nature, enhances the power of the

senses, opens the imagination, adds to his character he90

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roic and sacred attributes, establishes marriage, and gives

permanence to human society.

The natural association of the sentiment of love with

the heyday of the blood seems to require that in order to

portray it in vivid tints, which every youth and maid should

confess to be true to their throbbing experience, one

must not be too old. The delicious fancies of youth reject

the least savor of a mature philosophy, as chilling with

age and pedantry their purple bloom. And therefore I

know I incur the imputation of unnecessary hardness and

stoicism from those who compose the Court and Parliament

of Love. But from these formidable censors I shall

appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered that this

passion of which we speak, though it begin with the

young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers no one

who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged

participators of it not less than the tender maiden, though

in a different and nobler sort. For it is a fire that kindling

its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom,

caught from a wandering spark out of another private

heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon

multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart

of all, and so lights up the whole world and all nature

with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether

we attempt to describe the passion at twenty, at thirty,

or at eighty years. He who paints it at the first period

will lose some of its later, he who paints it at the last,

some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that by

patience and the Muses’ aid we may attain to that inward

view of the law which shall describe a truth ever young

and beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to

the eye, at whatever angle beholden.

And the first condition is, that we must leave a too

close and lingering adherence to facts, and study the

sentiment as it appeared in hope and not in history. For

each man sees his own life defaced and disfigured, as the

life of man is not, to his imagination. Each man sees over

his own experience a certain stain of error, whilst that of

other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to

those delicious relations which make the beauty of his

life, which have given him sincerest instruction and nourishment,

he will shrink and moan. Alas! I know not why,

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but infinite compunctions embitter in mature life the remembrances

of budding joy and cover every beloved name.

Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect,

or as truth. But all is sour, if seen as experience.

Details are melancholy; the plan is seemly and noble. In

the actual world—the painful kingdom of time and place—

dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the

ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the

Muses sing. But grief cleaves to names, and persons, and

the partial interests of to-day and yesterday.

The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion

which this topic of personal relations usurps in the conversation

of society. What do we wish to know of any

worthy person so much, as how he has sped in the history

of this sentiment? What books in the circulating

libraries circulate? How we glow over these novels of passion,

when the story is told with any spark of truth and

nature! And what fastens attention, in the intercourse of

life, like any passage betraying affection between two

parties? Perhaps we never saw them before, and never

shall meet them again. But we see them exchange a

glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer

strangers. We understand them, and take the warmest

interest in the development of the romance. All mankind

love a lover. The earliest demonstrations of complacency

and kindness are nature’s most winning pictures. It is the

dawn of civility and grace in the coarse and rustic. The

rude village boy teases the girls about the school-house

door;—but to-day he comes running into the entry, and

meets one fair child disposing her satchel; he holds her

books to help her, and instantly it seems to him as if she

removed herself from him infinitely, and was a sacred

precinct. Among the throng of girls he runs rudely enough,

but one alone distances him; and these two little neighbors,

that were so close just now, have learned to respect

each other’s personality. Or who can avert his eyes from

the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school-girls

who go into the country shops to buy a skein of silk or a

sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing with

the broad-faced, good-natured shop-boy. In the village

they are on a perfect equality, which love delights in,

and without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature

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of woman flows out in this pretty gossip. The girls may

have little beauty, yet plainly do they establish between

them and the good boy the most agreeable, confiding

relations, what with their fun and their earnest, about

Edgar and Jonas and Almira, and who was invited to the

party, and who danced at the dancing-school, and when

the singing-school would begin, and other nothings concerning

which the parties cooed. By and by that boy wants

a wife, and very truly and heartily will he know where to

find a sincere and sweet mate, without any risk such as

Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.

I have been told that in some public discourses of mine

my reverence for the intellect has made me unjustly cold

to the personal relations. But now I almost shrink at the

remembrance of such disparaging words. For persons are

love’s world, and the coldest philosopher cannot recount

the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to

the power of love, without being tempted to unsay, as

treasonable to nature, aught derogatory to the social instincts.

For though the celestial rapture falling out of

heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although

a beauty overpowering all analysis or comparison

and putting us quite beside ourselves we can seldom see

after thirty years, yet the remembrance of these visions

outlasts all other remembrances, and is a wreath of flowers

on the oldest brows. But here is a strange fact; it may

seem to many men, in revising their experience, that they

have no fairer page in their life’s book than the delicious

memory of some passages wherein affection contrived to

give a witchcraft, surpassing the deep attraction of its

own truth, to a parcel of accidental and trivial circumstances.

In looking backward they may find that several

things which were not the charm have more reality to

this groping memory than the charm itself which embalmed

them. But be our experience in particulars what

it may, no man ever forgot the visitations of that power

to his heart and brain, which created all things anew;

which was the dawn in him of music, poetry, and art;

which made the face of nature radiant with purple light,

the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a

single tone of one voice could make the heart bound, and

the most trivial circumstance associated with one form is

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put in the amber of memory; when he became all eye

when one was present, and all memory when one was

gone; when the youth becomes a watcher of windows

and studious of a glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of

a carriage; when no place is too solitary and none too

silent, for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation

in his new thoughts than any old friends, though

best and purest, can give him; for the figures, the motions,

the words of the beloved object are not like other

images written in water, but, as Plutarch said, “enamelled

in fire,” and make the study of midnight:—

“Thou art not gone being gone, where’er thou art,

Thou leav’st in him thy watchful eyes, in him thy

loving heart.”

In the noon and the afternoon of life we still throb at

the recollection of days when happiness was not happy

enough, but must be drugged with the relish of pain and

fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said of

love,—

“All other pleasures are not worth its pains:”

and when the day was not long enough, but the night

too must be consumed in keen recollections; when the

head boiled all night on the pillow with the generous

deed it resolved on; when the moonlight was a pleasing

fever and the stars were letters and the flowers ciphers

and the air was coined into song; when all business seemed

an impertinence, and all the men and women running to

and fro in the streets, mere pictures.

The passion rebuilds the world for the youth. It makes

all things alive and significant. Nature grows conscious.

Every bird on the boughs of the tree sings now to his

heart and soul. The notes are almost articulate. The clouds

have faces as he looks on them. The trees of the forest,

the waving grass and the peeping flowers have grown

intelligent; and he almost fears to trust them with the

secret which they seem to invite. Yet nature soothes and

sympathizes. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home

than with men:—

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“Fountain-heads and pathless groves,

Places which pale passion loves,

Moonlight walks, when all the fowls

Are safely housed, save bats and owls,

A midnight bell, a passing groan,—

These are the sounds we feed upon.”

Behold there in the wood the fine madman! He is a

palace of sweet sounds and sights; he dilates; he is twice

a man; he walks with arms akimbo; he soliloquizes; he

accosts the grass and the trees; he feels the blood of the

violet, the clover and the lily in his veins; and he talks

with the brook that wets his foot.

The heats that have opened his perceptions of natural

beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact

often observed, that men have written good verses under

the inspiration of passion, who cannot write well under

any other circumstances.

The like force has the passion over all his nature. It

expands the sentiment; it makes the clown gentle and

gives the coward heart. Into the most pitiful and abject

it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world, so

only it have the countenance of the beloved object. In

giving him to another it still more gives him to himself.

He is a new man, with new perceptions, new and keener

purposes, and a religious solemnity of character and aims.

He does not longer appertain to his family and society;

he is somewhat; he is a person; he is a soul.

And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of

that influence which is thus potent over the human youth.

Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate, welcome

as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which

pleases everybody with it and with themselves, seems

sufficient to itself. The lover cannot paint his maiden to

his fancy poor and solitary. Like a tree in flower, so much

soft, budding, informing loveliness is society for itself;

and she teaches his eye why Beauty was pictured with

Loves and Graces attending her steps. Her existence makes

the world rich. Though she extrudes all other persons

from his attention as cheap and unworthy, she indemnifies

him by carrying out her own being into somewhat

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impersonal, large, mundane, so that the maiden stands

to him for a representative of all select things and virtues.

For that reason the lover never sees personal resemblances

in his mistress to her kindred or to others.

His friends find in her a likeness to her mother, or her

sisters, or to persons not of her blood. The lover sees no

resemblance except to summer evenings and diamond

mornings, to rainbows and the song of birds.

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who

can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one

and another face and form? We are touched with emotions

of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find

whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points.

It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to

refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations

of friendship or love known and described in society, but,

as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable

sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness,

to what roses and violets hint and foreshow. We

cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves’-

neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles

the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character,

defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What

else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music,

“Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all

my endless life I have not found, and shall not find.” The

same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic

arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be

incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and

can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand,

but demands an active imagination to go with it and to

say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the

sculptor is always represented in a transition from that

which is representable to the senses, to that which is not.

Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of

painting. And of poetry the success is not attained when it

lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with

new endeavors after the unattainable. Concerning it Landor

inquires “whether it is not to be referred to some purer

state of sensation and existence.”

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming

and itself when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it

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becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams

and visions and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes

the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel

his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel

more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors

of a sunset.

Hence arose the saying, “If I love you, what is that to

you?” We say so because we feel that what we love is not

in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance.

It is that which you know not in yourself and can

never know.

This agrees well with that high philosophy of Beauty

which the ancient writers delighted in; for they said that

the soul of man, embodied here on earth, went roaming

up and down in quest of that other world of its own out

of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the

light of the natural sun, and unable to see any other

objects than those of this world, which are but shadows

of real things. Therefore the Deity sends the glory of youth

before the soul, that it may avail itself of beautiful bodies

as aids to its recollection of the celestial good and

fair; and the man beholding such a person in the female

sex runs to her and finds the highest joy in contemplating

the form, movement, and intelligence of this person,

because it suggests to him the presence of that which

indeed is within the beauty, and the cause of the beauty.

If however, from too much conversing with material

objects, the soul was gross, and misplaced its satisfaction

in the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow; body being

unable to fulfil the promise which beauty holds out;

but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions

which beauty makes to his mind, the soul passes

through the body and falls to admire strokes of character,

and the lovers contemplate one another in their discourses

and their actions, then they pass to the true palace of

beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and by

this love extinguishing the base affection, as the sun

puts out the fire by shining on the hearth, they become

pure and hallowed. By conversation with that which is in

itself excellent, magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover

comes to a warmer love of these nobilities, and a quicker

apprehension of them. Then he passes from loving them

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in one to loving them in all, and so is the one beautiful

soul only the door through which he enters to the society

of all true and pure souls. In the particular society of his

mate he attains a clearer sight of any spot, any taint

which her beauty has contracted from this world, and is

able to point it out, and this with mutual joy that they

are now able, without offence, to indicate blemishes and

hindrances in each other, and give to each all help and

comfort in curing the same. And beholding in many souls

the traits of the divine beauty, and separating in each

soul that which is divine from the taint which it has

contracted in the world, the lover ascends to the highest

beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by

steps on this ladder of created souls.

Somewhat like this have the truly wise told us of love

in all ages. The doctrine is not old, nor is it new. If Plato,

Plutarch and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo

and Milton. It awaits a truer unfolding in opposition and

rebuke to that subterranean prudence which presides at

marriages with words that take hold of the upper world,

whilst one eye is prowling in the cellar; so that its gravest

discourse has a savor of hams and powdering-tubs.

Worst, when this sensualism intrudes into the education

of young women, and withers the hope and affection of

human nature by teaching that marriage signifies nothing

but a housewife’s thrift, and that woman’s life has no

other aim.

But this dream of love, though beautiful, is only one

scene in our play. In the procession of the soul from

within outward, it enlarges its circles ever, like the pebble

thrown into the pond, or the light proceeding from an

orb. The rays of the soul alight first on things nearest, on

every utensil and toy, on nurses and domestics, on the

house and yard and passengers, on the circle of household

acquaintance, on politics and geography and history.

But things are ever grouping themselves according

to higher or more interior laws. Neighborhood, size, numbers,

habits, persons, lose by degrees their power over

us. Cause and effect, real affinities, the longing for harmony

between the soul and the circumstance, the progressive,

idealizing instinct, predominate later, and the

step backward from the higher to the lower relations is

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impossible. Thus even love, which is the deification of

persons, must become more impersonal every day. Of this

at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden

who are glancing at each other across crowded rooms with

eyes so full of mutual intelligence, of the precious fruit

long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external

stimulus. The work of vegetation begins first in the irritability

of the bark and leaf-buds. From exchanging glances,

they advance to acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery

passion, to plighting troth and marriage. Passion beholds

its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied,

and the body is wholly ensouled:—

“Her pure and eloquent blood

Spoke in her cheeks, and so distinctly wrought,

That one might almost say her body thought.”

Romeo, if dead, should be cut up into little stars to

make the heavens fine. Life, with this pair, has no other

aim, asks no more, than Juliet,—than Romeo. Night, day,

studies, talents, kingdoms, religion, are all contained in

this form full of soul, in this soul which is all form. The

lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons

of their regards. When alone, they solace themselves

with the remembered image of the other. Does

that other see the same star, the same melting cloud,

read the same book, feel the same emotion, that now

delight me? They try and weigh their affection, and adding

up costly advantages, friends, opportunities, properties,

exult in discovering that willingly, joyfully, they would

give all as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head,

not one hair of which shall be harmed. But the lot of

humanity is on these children. Danger, sorrow, and pain

arrive to them, as to all. Love prays. It makes covenants

with Eternal Power in behalf of this dear mate. The union

which is thus effected and which adds a new value to

every atom in nature—for it transmutes every thread

throughout the whole web of relation into a golden ray,

and bathes the soul in a new and sweeter element—is

yet a temporary state. Not always can flowers, pearls,

poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart,

content the awful soul that dwells in clay. It arouses

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itself at last from these endearments, as toys, and puts on

the harness and aspires to vast and universal aims. The

soul which is in the soul of each, craving a perfect beatitude,

detects incongruities, defects and disproportion in

the behavior of the other. Hence arise surprise, expostulation

and pain. Yet that which drew them to each other was

signs of loveliness, signs of virtue; and these virtues are

there, however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and

continue to attract; but the regard changes, quits the sign

and attaches to the substance. This repairs the wounded

affection. Meantime, as life wears on, it proves a game of

permutation and combination of all possible positions of

the parties, to employ all the resources of each and acquaint

each with the strength and weakness of the other.

For it is the nature and end of this relation, that they

should represent the human race to each other. All that is

in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly

wrought into the texture of man, of woman:—

“The person love does to us fit,

Like manna, has the taste of all in it.”

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The

angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the

windows, and the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues

they are united. If there be virtue, all the vices are

known as such; they confess and flee. Their once flaming

regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing in

violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough

good understanding. They resign each other without complaint

to the good offices which man and woman are

severally appointed to discharge in time, and exchange

the passion which once could not lose sight of its object,

for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present

or absent, of each other’s designs. At last they discover

that all which at first drew them together,—those once

sacred features, that magical play of charms,—was deciduous,

had a prospective end, like the scaffolding by

which the house was built; and the purification of the

intellect and the heart from year to year is the real marriage,

foreseen and prepared from the first, and wholly

above their consciousness. Looking at these aims with

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which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and

correlatively gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in

the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I do not wonder at

the emphasis with which the heart prophesies this crisis

from early infancy, at the profuse beauty with which the

instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and intellect

and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody

they bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not

sex, nor person, nor partiality, but which seeks virtue

and wisdom everywhere, to the end of increasing virtue

and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby

learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often

made to feel that our affections are but tents of a night.

Though slowly and with pain, the objects of the affections

change, as the objects of thought do. There are

moments when the affections rule and absorb the man

and make his happiness dependent on a person or persons.

But in health the mind is presently seen again,—

its overarching vault, bright with galaxies of immutable

lights, and the warm loves and fears that swept over us

as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with

God, to attain their own perfection. But we need not fear

that we can lose any thing by the progress of the soul.

The soul may be trusted to the end. That which is so

beautiful and attractive as these relations, must be succeeded

and supplanted only by what is more beautiful,

and so on for ever.

Thanks: Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson