A BROKEN HEART.
1. WOUNDED LOVE.—'Tis true that love wields a magic, sovereign, absolute, and tyrannical power over both the body and the mind when it is given control. It often, in case of dissapointment, works havoc and deals death blows to its victims, and leaves many in that morbid mental condition which no life-tonics simply can restore. Wounded love may be the result of hasty and indiscreet conduct of young people; or the outgrowth of lust, or the result of domestic infidelity and discord.
2. FATAL EFFECTS.—Our cemeteries receive within the cold shadows of
the grave thousands and thousands of victims that annually die from
the results of "broken hearts." It is no doubt a fact that love
troubles cause more disorders of the heart than everything else
combined.
3. DISRUPTED LOVE.—It has long been known that dogs, birds, and even
horses, when separated from their companions or friends, have pined
away and died; so it is not strange that man with his higher intuitive
ideas of affection should suffer from love when suddenly disrupted.
4. CRUCIFYING LOVE.—Painful love feelings strike right to the heart, and the breaking up of love that cannot be consummated in marriage is sometimes allowed to crucify the affections. There is no doubt that the suffering from disappointed love is often deeper and more intense than meeting death itself.
5. HEALING.—The paralyzing and agonizing consequences of ruptured love
can only be remedied by diversion and society. Bring the mind into a
state of patriotic independence with a full determination to blot
out the past. Those who cannot bring into subordination the pangs of
disappointment in love are not strong characters, and invariably
will suffer disappointments in almost every department of life. Disappointment in love means rising above it, and conquering it, or demoralization, mental, physical and sexual.
6. LOVE RUNS MAD.—Love comes unbidden. A blind ungovernable impulse
seems to hold sway in the passions of the affections. Love is blind
and seems to completely subdue and conquer. It often comes like a clap
of thunder from a clear sky, and when it falls it falls flat, leaving
only the ruins of a tornado behind.
7. BAD, DISMAL, AND BLUE FEELINGS.—Despondency breathes disease, and those who yield to it can neither work, eat nor sleep; they only suffer. The spell-bound, fascinated, magnetized affections seem to deaden self-control and no doubt many suffering from love-sickness are totally helpless; they are beside themselves, irritational and wild. Men and women of genius, influence and education, all seem to suffer alike, but they do not yield alike to the subduing influence; some pine away and die; others rise above it, and are the stronger and better for having been afflicted.
8. RISE ABOVE IT.—Cheer up! If you cannot think pleasurably over
your misfortune, forget it. You must do this or perish. Your power
and influence is too much to blight by foolish and melancholic pining. Your own sense, your self-respect, your self-love, your love for others, command you not to spoil yourself by crying over "spilt milk."
9. RETRIEVE YOUR PAST LOSS.—Do sun, moon, and stars indeed rise and
set in your loved one? Are there not "as good fish in the sea as ever
were caught?" and can you not catch them? Are there not other hearts
on earth just as loving and lovely, and in every way as congenial; If
circumstances had first turned you upon another, you would have felt
about that one as now about this. Love depends far less on the party
loved than on the loving one. Or is this the way either to retrieve
your past loss, or provide for the future? Is it not both unwise and
self-destructive; and in every way calculated to render your case, present and prospective, still more hopeless?
10. FIND SOMETHING TO DO.—Idle hands are Satan's workshop. Employ
your mind; find something to do; something in which you can find
self-improvement; something that will fit you better to be admired
by someone else, read, and improve your mind; get into society, throw
your whole soul into some new enterprise, and you will conquer with
glory and come out of the fire purified and made more worthy.