Читать книгу Death in the Age of Steam - Mel Bradshaw - Страница 4

Strange, and passing strange, that the relation between the two sexes, the passion of love in short, should not be taken into deeper consideration by our teachers and our legislators. People educate and legislate as if there were no such thing in the world; but ask the priest, ask the physician—let them reveal the amount of moral and physical results from this one cause. Must love always be discussed in blank verse, as if it were a thing to be played in tragedies or sung in songs—a subject for pretty poems and wicked novels, and had nothing to do with the prosaic current of our every-day existence, our moral welfare and eternal salvation? Must love be ever treated with profaneness, as a mere illusion? or with coarseness, as a mere impulse? or with fear, as a mere disease? or with shame, as a mere weakness? or with levity, as a mere accident? Whereas it is a great mystery and a great necessity, lying at the foundation of human existence, morality, and happiness; mysterious, universal, inevitable as death. Why then should love be treated less seriously than death? It is a serious thing . . .

—Anna Brownell Jameson,

Winter Studies and Summer Rambles in Canada (1838)