The Anatomy of Melancholy

Aretino’s Lucretia proved this very well, as she herself relates: “When I made some of my suitors believe that I would enter a convent, they grieved as though they had lost father and mother, because they would be deprived of my company for ever.” “All hardships were light”: every other burden was easy, but this could not be endured:

That I had to be without you.

For I cannot do without your company: mournful Amyntas, suffering Amyntas, anxious Amyntas. Better that a capital city be sacked, a royal army defeated, an invincible armada sunk and twenty thousand kings perish than that her little finger ache: so devoted are they, so solicitous for her welfare. “They would all become friars for my sake,” she continues, hoping in that way to meet or see me again as my confessors, at stoolball or at barley-break.

So afterwards, when a persistent suitor came, “If I told my maid to say that I had no time, was out, was busy or could not speak with him, he was instantly stunned and stood like a marble pillar. Another went away swearing, raging, cursing and foaming”:

That very utterance was fiercer to him than Jupiter’s anger when he thunders.

A mandrake’s cry would have been sweeter music. “But the man I welcomed was in the Elysian fields, transported with joy, quite beside himself.” This is the general disposition of all lovers: she is their rudder, Pole Star and guide.

The delight of his soul, and the loss of himself.

A tulip turns to the sun—our herbalists call it Narcissus—and when the sun shines it is “a wondrous flower opening to the sun’s rays,” a splendid flower unfolding itself. But when the sun sets or a storm comes, it closes, droops and loses all delight. Charles Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, once used this as an emblem in a similar cause. So all lovers respond to their mistress: she is their sun, their “first mover” or “animating soul.” One writer has elegantly expressed this through a windmill, always moved by the wind and otherwise incapable of motion itself:

So, unless your favour breathes upon me, I shall be a lifeless log.

He draws all his life from her breath; his soul lives in her body. “She alone holds the keys of destruction and deliverance”: she keeps the keys of his life. His fortunes ebb and flow with her favour; a kindly or unfriendly look raises or casts him down:

My mind grows bright, Lucia, in your light.

Whether his present condition pleases or distresses him, it continues as long as he loves. He can do nothing, think of nothing but her. Desire has no rest. She is his Cynosure, Hesperus and Vesper, his morning and evening star, his goddess, his mistress, his life, his soul, his everything. Dreaming or waking, he always speaks of her; his heart, eyes, ears and every thought are full of her. His Laura, his Victorina, his Columbina, Flavia, Flaminia, Celia, Delia or Isabella—call her what you will—is the sole object of his senses, the substance of his soul, “his soul’s little nest.” He exalts her beyond measure, “wholly absorbed in her,” so full of her that he can breathe nothing else.