What says this glance? What meaning lurks in this Squeezing of hands, embrace, and ling’ring kiss? This only can your heart explain to you. What have such matters with the brain to do? W. F. H. So, for instance, says Aarestrup; but he adds as a sort of explanation-- But when I see thee my fond kiss denying, And straightway, nathless, mine embrace not spurning, Then needs must I to tedious arts be turning, And let crabb’d wisdom from my lips go flying. Know then the voice alone interprets rightful And with poetic fire from heart’s depth welleth, And yet the sweetest of them all by no means! Whereas the bosom, arms, and lips, and eye-sheens-- How shall I call it? for the total swelleth Unto a language wordless as delightful. W. F. H. which has not brought us nearer to a solution of the question. Other poets give us an allegorical transcription, couched in vague poetical terms, which rather refer to the feelings of which the kiss may be an expression than attempt to define its physiology. Thus Paul Verlaine defines a kiss as “the fiery accompaniment on the keyboard of the teeth of the lovely songs which love sings in a burning heart.” Baiser! rose trémière au jardin des caresses! Vif accompagnement sur le clavier des dents, Des doux refrains qu’Amour chante en les cœurs ardents Avec sa voix d’archange aux langueurs charmeresses! This definition, which seems to me to be as original as it is beautiful and apt, deals, however, exclusively with the kiss of love; but kisses, as we all know, are capable of expressing many other emotions, and it enlightens us not one whit as to the external side of the nature of a kiss. Let us, therefore, leave the poets, and seek refuge with the philologists. In the _Dictionary of the Danish Philological Society_ (_Videnskabernes Selskabs Ordbog_) a kiss is defined as “a pressure of the mouth against a body.” As every one at once perceives, this explanation is very unsatisfactory, for, from the above statements, we could hardly accept more than one, viz., the mouth. Now, of course, it is quite clear that one of the first requisites for a kiss is a mouth. “Einen Kuss an sich, ohne Mund, kann man nicht geben,” say the Germans, and it is also remarkable that in Finnish, _antaa sunta_, “to kiss,” means literally “to give mouth.” How does the mouth produce a kiss?