The Ketchum keystone. [volume] (Ketchum, Idaho) 1885-1899, 1894-07-28
LuNAT1c LOVERS.

LuNATIC LOVERS.
Histor1c Instances that Prove that All
Lovesick People Are Insane.
There are, I dare say, millions Of lovers
whose love is 80 commonplace that it does
not affect their reason. Love in their
eyes means BUSINESS prologue. 30 to
speak, to marriage. The lovers, however,
who yield them selves heart and soul to
the tender passion, who allow themselves
to be bound in the tenderest ties and are
blind to the existence of everybody save
themselves, must certainly have screw
loose somewhere in their mental anatomy.
The stoics, who looked on all affection
as foolish waste of energy, regarded love
as grave mental disease. Shakespeare
that unrivaled analyst of the weaknesses
of human nature-is authority for the
statement that
Inc luQ8LlC, lie lOVCI 0uu IuC POCt
Are of Imagination all compact.
Rosalind, one of his sancst characters,
exclaims: "Love is merely madness,
and, tell you, deserves dark house and
q whip as madmen do; and the reason it
is not so punished and cured is that the
lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers
are in love tool" Bacon calls love "spe-
cies of madness; while Byron confessed
toward the close of his short, but check
cred, career that it was madness for him
to have loved so passionately As he did.
A large number of the worlds eminent
men have made fools of themselves for
love of woman. Father Adam lost Para
disc on earth for himself and for posterity
by yielding to Ewes tempting offer of a
slice of apple. Holofernes lost his head
in two senses-by accepting the caress-
es of Judith. Antony was lunatic to
have sacrificed everything to his love of
the charming Cleopatra. Paris, son of
Priam, ought to have been put in a strait
jacket for having tempered with the mat
rimonial preserves of Menelaus-the re-
suit of which poaching on bis part caused
the spilling of oceans of human blood, as
we'll as the destruction of Troy.
Petrarch spent his crazy life penning
sonnets to the eyebrows of portly mar
ried woman, the mother of large family,
while be utterly neglected his legitimate
wife, and would not permit his daughter
to live under his roof! Dante in his
maudlin love to Beatrice says: $50 pow
srful was the spell of her presence that
had to avoid her. From thinking of this
most gracious creature l became go weak
and lean that it was irksome for my
friends to look at mel" He was com
PEELED to hide his skeleton frame in shame
and confusion-a spectacle for ridicule
and derision. Is not this proof evidence
that even the brightest and strongest gent
uses degenerate into silly, addIe. headed
monomaniacs under the influence Of this
fatal passion? When Beatrice for the
first time denied him her smile, he says
that he become possessed with such grief
that, parting himself from others, he went
into lonely place to battle the ground
with the bitterest tears!
Love found its readiest victims in the
knights and troubadors of the Middle
Ages. Ulrich Won Lichtenstein, medi-
aeval German cavalier, loved a married
woman with all the intensity of a lunatic.
He used to drink with gusto the water in
which she had laved her dainty hands.
He had a portion of his under lip cut off
because his mistress told him that it was
$50 irregular in construction that it did
not invite her Kisses" He used to roam
over hills and valleys in quest of other
knights whom he challenged to duels, if
they dared to doubt that his Dulcinea
was the falrest of the fair. On one occa-
sion he amputated one of his fingers and
presented it to his patroness, as proof
of the torture he could endure for her
sweet sake. At her command he went
among the lepers and drank from the
same bowl, in order to test his devotion
to his lady love. All this time Ulrich's
wife pinned alone in her chateau in the for
est, waiting anxiously for her dear lord,
who, when he arrived on the scene, look
ing so utterly tired and dilapidated that
she had to put him to bed and nurse him
for several months, at the expiration of
which time he would sally forth once more
to do doughty deeds for another mans
wife! Ulrich was . very good type of the
lunatic lover.
Hadlaub tells US of Teuton mime
singer or troubadour who fell so helpless
~ in love with little girl that, when
she used to bite him, he became "bliss-
fully ecstatic" with "all his senses like
burning Goals. Her bite" he naively
confesses, "was so tender and SO womanly
that l used to be sorry the feeling of it
passed away SO soon!'' Pierre Vidal,
another troubadour, was so infatuated
with his lady love, whose name asaLoba"
-wolf-that be had himself sewed up in