ON KISSING.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume V, Issue 40, 4 October 1890, Page 14

ON KISSING.

‘ Touch but my lips with those fair lips of thine ; The kiss shall be thine own as well as mine.’ Shakespeare. Do we not all lemeinber the kisses that, as children, were forced upon us, and those that we were obliged to bestow ourselves ? * Now, kiss So-and-so, there’s a good child !’ Generally ‘ So-and-so ’ was someone to whom we had a particular objection. It would be far better for all parties to abolish this formal kissing. Reickenbach has a theory that the pleasurable sensation of a kiss is ‘ owing to the polarization of odic force upon the fifth pair of nerves.’ Be this as it may, there is no doubt that kissing some persons is a pleasure. Parents and children, sisters and brothers, kiss as a matter of habit, and mean more or less by these osculations. They say that the purest kiss in the world is that given by a loving little child to its mother. Later in life it frequently becomes a form. Cousins kiss as a matter of privilege ; but, fair girls, do not allow your male cousins too many kisses, and remember that men cease to value what they can obtain easily. It is not now the custom for grave young gentlemen to ‘salute’ demure young ladies on a first presentation, as it was a hundred years ago ; but that kisses are snatched, half-stolen, or coaxed from many a pair of sweet young lips which are neither kith nor kin, nor ever going to be, it were prudery to deny. Only, again remember, it is the fruit that hangs just out of reach that is most tempting ; it is the bright, delicate blossom at the top of the impassable cliff that is the fairest flower of all. Men have risked their lives to find and gather edelweiss in its frozen hiding-places ; but edelweiss gathered, and handled, and made common is, to my thinking, a very poor sort of thing. Then there is the sacred kiss between husband and wife. Alas ! that a man so frequently tires of what he may have for nothing. An old lady once told me that when she was a girl she visited a bride friend, and when the husband came home at night, tired, hungry, cold and cross, his young wife rushed into the hall-, and seizing him as he struggled out of his overcoat, devoured him with kisses, to which he presently responded : ‘ There, there, my dear, perhaps if you didn’t kiss me quite so much I should want to kiss you more.’ Of course, the man was a brute, but his brutality was founded upon a sound truth. But theie are so many kinds of kisses that again the subject of what is permissible becomes involved in doubt. There is a kiss of loving friendship between women, the kiss of reconciliation, the kiss of simple greeting, the respectful kiss offered to age, the kiss of mere custom, happily going out of fashion, for it has been at some periods a most wearisome and nauseous obligation, as often as one met the most casual acquaintance. And then there are the Judas kisses, when man or woman cares to offer the token of love to conceal inconstancy, treachery and meditated treason, the worst kind of lie the lips can frame. And last of all comes that chill, sad kiss, that passionless caress upon lips never cold to us before, that mute farewell that every one of us has been called to make soon or late, and which some one yet shall make to us ; and then ? Ah, then ?

It is said in Paris that Mrs Mackay owns the finest jewels in the world. Two specimens certainly take precedence over any of the kind that are known. One is a sapphire she bought from a Russian Prince worth £30,000. Among her other toys is a necklace of pearls worth £20,000 and a pair of solitaires worth £85.000.