Note 55 — Chapter VII · The Marriage of the Positive Girl and the Positive Man
Reading edition
That is why the world’s greatest love stories—those of Dante and Beatrice, Romeo and Juliet, and Heathcliff and the elder Catherine (in Wuthering Heights)—are all stories of a love that was never consummated. In poetry and fiction, as in life, it is felt that for a great love romance to remain at its lofty level of passion and desire, the couple enacting it must never have an opportunity of living together as man and wife.