Love dies, and it is just as well to strangle it in its birth; it can only die once. Many erroneous things have been written and said by the sages, but never did they float a greater fallacy than that love serves as a spur to win the loved one by patient toil. Miss Hepzibah never had a lover, poor thing, how could she? Nor ever knew, by her own experience, what love technically means. People of high intellectual endowments do not require similar ones in those they love. They are just the persons to appreciate the wholesome gush of natural feeling, the honest affection, the simple joy, the fullness of contentment with what they love. When women have other objects in life, they are not apt to fall in love. We draw one breath; we live one life. What a sweet reverence is that, when a young man deems his mistress a little more than mortal, and almost chides himself for longing to bring her close to his heart!

It is to the credit of human nature, that, expect where its selfishness is brought into play, it loves more readily than it hates. Hatred, by gradual and quiet process will even be transformed to love, unless the change be impeded by a continually new irritation of the original feeling of hostility. It is a curious subject of observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same thing at the bottom. Each, in its utmost development, supposes a high degree of intimacy and heart knowledge; each renders one individual dependent for the food of his affections and spiritual life upon another, each leaves the passionate lover, or the no less passionate hater, forlorn and desolate by the withdrawal of his subject.

There is nothing so good as a voyage to England to cure a love fit. There is no circumstance of life which a man so much feels the advantage of having two strings to his bow as in a love affair. The study of love is very much like meteorology. We know that just about so much rain will fall in a season; but on what particular day it will shower is more than we can tell. We know that just about so much love will be made every year in a given population; but who will rain his young affections upon the heart of whom is not known except to the astrologers and fortune tellers. And why rain falls as it does and why love is made just as it is are equally puzzling questions.

Many a woman rejects a man because he is in love with her, and accepts another because he is not. Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness, of hatred, of jealousy, and, most easily of all, of fear. Love gives even to a dull man the knowledge of his lover’s heart. When a man is in love, there is nothing else of him.I do not see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man should not fall in love with a rich girl, as easily as a poor one. The whole business of love, and lovemaking and marrying, is painted by the novelists in a monstrous disproportion to the other relations of life. Why should not people in love behave sensibly?

The loved object is always complicated. One does not want a lover one pities. It is a mistaken notion to suppose that a third person is always an encumbrance to lovers. Formed by nature for love, the human heart sympathizes instinctively in the misfortunes too often occasioned by it. Cease to be astonished, and only learn to love, an important lesson, and one not too well learned. However, I am afraid that just as Eve was deceived by the serpent’s cunning, your minds will somehow be led astray from your sincere and pure devotion to Christ. For if someone comes to you and preaches a Jesus other than the Jesus we preached, or if you received, or a different gospel from the one you accepted, you put up with it easily enough. However, I do not think I am in the least inferior to those super-apostles. I may not be trained speaker, but I do have knowledge. We have made this perfectly clear to you in every way. Was it a sin for me to lower myself in order to elevate you by preaching the gospel of God to you free of charge?