“May never was the month of love, For May is full of flowers; But rather April, wet by kind, For love is full of showers.” SHAKSPERE— “Good-night, good-night, parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good-night till it be morrow.” “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs; Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes; Being vex’d, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears; What is it else? a madness most discreet, A choking gall and a preserving sweet.” Petrarch’s poems, says Shelley, “are as spells which unseal the inmost enchanted fountains of the delight which is the grief of love.” In that part of the _Romance of the Rose_ which was written by Jean de Meung, and translated by Chaucer, occur many similar phrases depicting Love as an _emotional paradox_: “Also a sweet hell it is, and a sorrowful paradise;” “delight right full of heaviness, and drearihood full of gladness;” “a heavy burden light to bear;” “wise madness,” “despairing hope,” etc. Mr. Ruskin, who quotes the whole passage in his _Fors Clavigera_, declares: “I know of no such lovely love-poem as his since Dante.” As for Dante, he fully realised the “sweet pain” of Love, as he called it. As far back as Plato’s _Timæus_ we find that love, as then understood, was regarded as “a mixture of pleasure and pain.” “’Tis the pest of love,” sings Keats, “that fairest joys bring most unrest.” Thackeray speaks of “the delights and tortures, the jealousy and wakefulness, the longing and raptures, the frantic despair and elation, attendant upon the passion of love.” But it is superfluous to cite modern authors, for volumes might be filled with quotations attesting that Love is neither a simple “lætitia,” as Spinoza defined it, nor “a species of melancholy,” but a mixture of joy and sadness, of rapture and woe. Shakspere’s “_violent sorrow seems a modern ecstasy_” might be adopted as a general motto for a book on the psychology and history of Love. Love, it is true, is not the only passion characterised by such a paradoxical mixture of moods. Thus in _Macbeth_ the sentence, “on the torture of the mind to lie in restless ecstasy,” does not refer to Love; and John Fletcher, too, sings in a general way— “There’s naught in this life sweet If man were wise to see’t, But only melancholy, O sweetest Melancholy!”