The suitor who—dressed for the occasion—went first to the father to declare his feelings for the daughter is already such an old-fashioned type that it is past ridicule. The brilliant wedding festival will soon come to be regarded as ridiculous, then unbecoming, and finally immoral. And—like other survivals of the time when marriage was the affair of the family—it has already begun to disappear, in the same degree as love has developed. Lovers are less and less inclined to tolerate a spying upon their finest feelings; they are increasingly anxious to rescue these from the prying fingers of society, of family, and of friends. More and more is love venerated as part of nature’s mysticism, whose course no outsider can determine, whose sensitive manifestations and uncertain possibilities no one may disturb, a mysticism within whose sphere a fixed timetable would be out of place. How can Love, one of the great lords of life, take its freedom from the hands of society any more than Death, the other, can do so? “Love and Death, which meet like the two sides of a mountain-ridge, whose highest points are ever where they come together” (G. Rodenbach); Love and Death, which—one with the wings of the dawn, the other with those of the night sky—overshadow the portals between earthly life and the two great darknesses which enclose it—only these two powers are comparable in majesty. But while there is only one death, there are many sorts of love. Death never plays. When all love becomes equally serious, it will also possess death’s right to choose its own time.