The Anatomy of Melancholy

The prognosis of love melancholy

I have said enough about the fires, torments, cares, jealousies, suspicions, fears, griefs and anxieties that accompany people in love. The next question is what these miseries will lead to, what they foretell. Some believe that this love cannot be cured: “No herbs can remedy love.” It accompanies them to the end.

The same love destroys the flock and its master.

It is so persistent that almost no persuasion can relieve it. “Tell me not to love,” said Euryalus, “and you might as well tell the mountains to come down into the plains, or the rivers to run back to their springs. I can cease loving as soon as the sun can abandon its course.”

Sooner will the seas lack fish, the mountains shade, The woods their birds, and the winds their murmuring, Than my passion for beautiful Amaryllis leave me.

First seas shall lose their fish, the mountains shade, Woods their songbirds, the winds their murmuring, Before my love for fair Amaryllis is allayed.

Tell me not to love: tell a deaf man to hear, a blind man to see, a mute man to speak, a lame man to run. Advice does no good; a sick man has no taste for anything. No medicine can relieve me.

The arts that benefit everyone else do not benefit their master.

So Apollo confessed; and Jupiter himself could not be cured.

Medicine cures all human pains; Love alone has no practitioner to treat its sickness.

Medicine can soon cure every disease, Except for love, which it cannot appease.

But whether love can be cured, and by what means, will be explained in its proper place. Meanwhile, if it runs its course without relief or remedy, it often erupts in outrageous and monstrous consequences. “Love and Bacchus are violent gods,” as Tatius observes, “and so inflame the mind that they compel it to forget shame.” Love and Bacchus are such violent gods, and rage so furiously in our minds, that they make us forget all decency, shame and ordinary civility.

For people thoroughly possessed by this passion usually become “senseless and mad”—it is “mad love,” as the poet calls it—beside themselves and, as I have shown, no better than beasts: irrational, unthinking, headstrong, with no fear of God or men. They often swear falsely, squander money, steal, commit incest, rape, adultery and murder, and depopulate towns, cities and countries to satisfy their lust.

It is a devil, working such mischief As pagan, Jew or Turk has never done.

The Trojan War is witness enough. And, as Appian says of Antony and Cleopatra in book 5 of his History, “Their love brought them and all Egypt into extreme and wretched calamities.” Her end is as bitter as wormwood and as sharp as a two-edged sword: Proverbs 5:4–5. “Her feet go down to death; her steps lead on to hell.” “She is more bitter than death” (Ecclesiastes 7:28), “and the sinner shall be taken by her.”