Love is like some fresh spring, first a stream and then a river, changing its aspect and its nature as it flows to plunge itself in some boundless ocean, where restricted natures only find monotony, but where great souls are engulfed in endless contemplation.
It is for homely features to keep home,- They had their name thence; coarse complexions And cheeks of sorry grain will serve to ply The sampler and to tease the huswife's wool. What need a vermeil-tinctur'd lip for that, Love-darting eyes, or tresses like the morn?
Love is not only a feeling, it is also an art. A simple word, a sensitive precaution, a mere nothing reveal to a woman the sublime artist who can touch her heart without withering it.
The pleasures of love proceed successively from a distich to a quatrain, from a quatrain to a sonnet, from a sonnet to a ballad, from a ballad to an ode, from an ode to a cantata, and from a cantata to a dithyramb. A husband who begins with the dithyramb is a fool.
That god forbid, that made me first your slave, I should in thought control your times of pleasure, Or at your hand th' account of hours to crave, Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure.
So soon as this want or power [of love] is dead, man becomes the living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the mere husk of what once he was.