_First Love is not best._—Thus even Heine, while lamenting the transitoriness of Love, cannot help suggesting that in man, at any rate, second Love may be stronger than first. On this point it is curious to note the difference of opinion among thoughtful writers. La Bruyère declares that “we can love well once only—the first time; the loves which follow are less involuntary.” Another French author, Letourneau, on the contrary, thinks that one love-affair only whets the appetite for more: “on a besoin de vivre fort;” and hence “an expiring passion ordinarily leaves the ground admirably prepared for the germination of another passion.” Stendhal held that a young girl of eighteen, “owing to her inadequate experience of life, is not comprehensive enough in her desires to be able to love with as much passion as a woman of twenty-eight;” and a lady-friend having objected to this on the ground that in her first love a girl must love more ardently because her feelings are not distracted by doubt and distrust, as they are subsequently, he replied that this very _méfiance_, in its struggle with love, will make it come out a thousand times more brilliant and substantial than the gay and thoughtless first love.” Mr. P. G. Hamerton seems to cast his vote in the same urn, for he thinks, “it is, indeed, one of the signs of a healthy nature to retain for many years the freshness of the heart which makes one liable to fall in love, as a healthy palate retains the natural early taste for delicious fruits.” And, finally, George Eliot asks: “How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy’s flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.” So doctors evidently disagree. But the facts that Heine is in doubt, that the greatest authority makes Romeo’s unparalleled passion his second love, and that even Werther’s famous love, notwithstanding Goethe’s theory, is not his first, certainly make the scale incline in favour of a second or later passion. “Now old desire doth in his deathbed lie, And young affection gapes to be his heir; That fair for which love groaned for, and would die, With tender Juliet matched, is now not fair.”