I'll be a park, and thou shalt be my deer;
Feed where thou wilt, on mountain or in dale;
Graze on my lips; and if those hills be dry
Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie. . . .
And pay them at thy leisure, one by one.
What is ten hundred touches unto thee?
Are they not quickly told and quickly gone?
Say, for non-payment that the debt should double,
Is twenty thousand kisses such a trouble?"
Adonis was not a soul-kiss sheik: and preferred to be slain by a boar, rather than be loved by a goddess. Something was wrong with that boy.
The caresses and kisses that mark the height of love's ecstasy, in many cases, have no limitation of time or place. The most intimate kisses, as Freud points out, are not perversions, if used as proper preludes to the ultimate mating: they are perversions only when they substitute for the mating. The kiss itself, as he shows, may be a perversion—the lip kiss, that is. So great is its thrill, that there are men and women who use it instead of the mating, to secure love's thrill: and this is not normal. The stern biological compulsion to normal men and women, that they mate fully and reproduce their kind, worded in the old book of Genesis:
still stirs within us: and there is a price to pay, if it be ignored. Those who flee from kissing and love for a lifetime, through some delusion that they have chosen a higher way,
