Very properly do woman speak of sinking into the arms of their husbands. Happy she who can rise into the embrace of her lover.

— Novalis, Flower Dust

We were comrades like two stars and like two clouds that wander the same path, breathing the same air and without words, wishless, having a sense of comfort.. It seemed to me we were already going beside each other for an unthinkable long time and it would never take an end.

~Hermann Hesse, Taedium vitae

Faraway out of the the twilight, which seems timeless to us,
Grows a gentle, an eternal star!

— Otto Ernst, Comrades

Art: Andrea Fossati, The Guiding Light

And thou, my lady, in thy hand dost rule
Mine eyes and heart which thou hast made thine
   own.
  Love rocks my life with tempests on the deep,
Even as a ship round which the winds are blown:
Thou art my pennon that
will not go down.

— from Guido Delle Colonne's Canzone To Love and to his Lady

A fresh content of fresh enamouring
   Yields me afresh, at length, the sense of song,
  Who had well-nigh forgotten Love so long:
But now my homage he will have me bring.
So that my life is now a joyful thing,
  Having new-found desire, elate and strong,
  In her to whom all grace and worth belong,
On whom I now attend for ministering.
The countenance remembering, with the limbs,
  She was all imaged on my
  heart at once
   Suddenly by a single look at her:
Whom when I now behold, a heat there seems
   Within, as of a subtle fire that runs
    Unto my heart, and remains burning there

— late 13th century Poet Ser Pace notaio, Sonnet A return to love

'In general those parts of a flower which we most admire, such as the petals, are secondary sexual characters, closely associated with the minute primary characters. The whole assembly is paraded and flaunted with joyful unconcern above the more mundane structural…