... When the head boiled all night on the
pillow with the generous deed it resolved on.... When
all business seemed an impertinence, and all men and
women running to and fro in the streets, mere
pictures."
THE POWER OF LOVE
In the essay "On the Power of Love," to which I have referred in
another place, Lichtenberg bluntly declared he did not believe that
sentimental love could make a sensible adult person so extravagantly
happy or unhappy as the poets would have us think, whereas he was
ready to concede that the sexual appetite may become irresistible.
Schopenhauer, on the contrary, held that sentimental love is the more
powerful of the two passions. However this may be, either is strong
enough to account for the prevalence of amorous hyperbole in
literature to such an extent that, as Bacon remarked, "speaking in a
perpetual hyperbole is comely in nothing but in love." "The major part
of lovers," writes Robert Burton,
"are carried headlong like so many brute beasts, reason
counsels one way, thy friends, fortunes, shame, disgrace,
danger, and an ocean of cares that will certainly follow;
yet this furious lust precipitates, counterpoiseth, weighs
down on the other."
Professor Bain, discussing all the human emotions in a volume of 600
pages, declares, regarding love (138), that
"the excitement at its highest pitch, in the torrent of
youthful sensations and ungratified desires is probably
the most furious and elated experience of human
nature.
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