The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-10-15
First Love.

H1r6t Love- Inc lOLB hIhhDOI VI hOi ShOO-
tiOns is without any distinct end or beginning;
she mounts by insensible gradations from
dolls and kittens and pet brothers to the
zenith of passion, 20 descend by the same in
sensible gradations from the zenith of passion
through pet brothers to tabby cats. There
is no such event as first kiss in boys life
10 mark for woman the transition from girl
hood TO the sudden maturity of passion; she
has been kissing and purring and fondling
and petting from her cradle, and she will pet
and fondle and purr and kiss to her grave
Love, in the technical sense of the word, is
with her little more than an intensfying of
her ordinary life. There is no new picture,
but the colOrs are for the while little height
ened and the tone raised. Presently the vi
vidness of color will fade again, and the
cool greys lower the tone, and the passion of
life will have died away. But
there will be no definite moment at
which one could fairly say that love came or
went. A girl who is not whispering in a
lovers ear will always say, frankly enough,
that she never knew what it is to be in love.
There is one obvious deduction which she for
gets to draw, that there never can be time
when she can know what it is to be in love-
Here and there, of course, q woman may be
cold, or later in development, or more self
conscious, and may divide by more rigidly
marked lines the phases of her life. But even
then, if she be woman at all, she can have
no first love. Feeling, with woman, has no
past as It hes no future. Every phase of her
life begins with an act of oblivion. Every
love is a first love. 81 never loved any one
before" is said and said truly, to q dozen
loving ears in succession. ''The first thing 1
should like to meet with in Paradise, said
Lady Wortley Montagu, ''would be the
river Lethe, the stream of forgetfulness. But
woman finds q little rivulet of Lethe at
every stage of her hearts career. If she re-
members the past at all, it is to offer it up as
a burnt sacrifice to the deity of the present.
When Cleopatra talked about Caesar to Mark
Antony, she passed, no doubt, her fingers
through her lovers hair and wondered how
she could ever have dotted on such q bald
pated fellow as the Dictator. Had she sue
seeded in charming Octavius, she would have
wondered equally at her infatuation for such
a ne'er-do-well as Antony. And so it is no
wonder that woman's first love, even if she
Iealizes it at all, goes down in this general
wreck of the past. But in mans life it is a
revolution. 1t is, in fact, the one thing that
makes him man. The world of boyhood
is strictly q world of boys. Sisters, cousins,
aunts, mothers, are mixed up in the general
crowd of barbarians that stand with
out the playground. There are few
warmer or more poetic affections
than the chivalrous friendship of
schoolfellows; there is no truer or more
genuine worship than boys worship of the
hero of the scrimmage or the cricket-feld. 1t
is fine world in itself, but it is a wonder
fully narrow and restricted world. Not girl
may peep over the palings. Girls can't jump,
OF fag out, or swarm up a tree; they have
nothing to talk about as boys talk they never |
heard of that glorious swipe of Old Browns; |
they are awful milk-sops; they cry and ''tell |
mamma;" they are afraid of gOverness and |
of q COW. 1t is impossible to conceive crea-
ture more utterly contemplate in boys eyes
than girl of his own age usually is. Then |
in some fatal moment comes the revolution. |
The barrier of contempt goes down with q |
crash. The boy-world disappears. Brown, |
that god of the playground, is cast to the owls |
and to the bats. There is a sudden GOODNESS |
in the friendship that was to last from school |
to the grave. Paper-chases and the annual |
match with the ''old fellows" cease to be the !
highest objects of humaninterest. There isless .
excitement than there was last year when
a great cheer welcomes the news that Mugby
has got the Ireland. The boys life has be-
come muddled and confused. The old exist
ence is sheering off, and the new comes shyly,
fitfully 1t is only by sort Of compulsion
that he will own that he is making all this
'fuss" about girl. For the moment he re-
bels against the spell of that one little face,
the witehery of that one little hand He lin
gers on the borders of this new country from
whence there is no return to the old-playing
field. He is shy, strange to this world of wo-
men, and women's talk, and women's ways
The surest, steadiest foot on the cricket
ground stumbles over footstools and tangles
itself in colored woods. The sturdiest arm
that ever welded bat trembles at the touch of
tiny finger. The voice that rang out like
a trumpet among the tumult of football
bushes and trembles and falters in saying
haf-a-dozen commonplace words. The old
sense of mastery is gone. He knows that
every chit in the nursery has found out his
secret, and is laughing over it. He bushes,
and boys blush is hot, painful thing when
the sisterly heads bend together, and he hears
them whispering what fool he is. Yes, he
is fool-that is one thing which he feels
quite certain about There is only one other
thing that he feels even more certain about
that he is in love, and that love has made
him a man.
We are not, of course, going to trench ON
the field of poets and moral preachers, or to
expound, like Sir Barnes Newcome, the phllo-
sophy of the affections, or to demonstrate,
with Miss Faithful and Mrs. Fawcett, the
great Office which First Love fulils IN the
economy of man. The only remark we have
10 make is the very obvious one which moral
preachers may be pardOned for forgetting,
that it is on the whole wonderfully pleasant
thing. If one enters it through Purgatory,
il is none the less Paradise at which one an
riyes, an Eden with its tree of knowledge and
its tree of life There is none of the distrust,
the irony, the low-pitched expectations Of
after affections no practical second thoughts;