From Robert Burton – The Anatomy of Melancholy:What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up(Oxford, 1621).
Memb. iii.:Symptoms or signs of Love Melancholy, in Body, Mind, good, bad, &c.
Symptoms are either of body or mind; of body, paleness, leanness, dryness, &c.; as the poet describes lovers: … love causeth leanness, “makes hollow eyes, dryness, symptoms of this disease, to go smiling to themselves, or acting as if they saw or heard some delectable object … hollow-eyed, their eyes are hidden in their heads … they pine away, and look ill with waking, cares, sighs, “And eyes that once rivalled the locks of Phoebus, lose the patrial and paternal lustre.” With groans, griefs, sadness, dullness,want of appetite, &c.
A reason of all this:“because of the distraction of the spirits the liver doth not perform his part, nor turns the aliment into blood as it ought, and for that cause the members are weak for want of sustenance, they are lean and pine, as the herbs of my garden do this month of May, for want of rain.” The green sickness therefore often happeneth to young women, a cachexia or an evil habit to men, besides their ordinary sighs, complaints, and lamentations, which are too frequent. As drops from a still … doth Cupid's fire provoke tears from a true lover's eyes … with many such like passions. When Chariclia was enamoured of Theagines … “she was half distracted, and spake she knew not what, sighed to herself, lay much awake, and was lean upon a sudden” and when she was besotted on her son-in-law …she had ugly paleness, hollow eyes, restless thoughts, short wind, &c. Euryalus, in an epistle sent to Lucretia, his mistress, complains amongst other grievances … thou hast taken my stomach and my sleep from me. So he describes it aright:
His sleep, his meat, his drink, in him bereft,
That lean he waxeth, and dry as a shaft,
His eyes hollow and grisly to behold,
His hew pale and ashen to unfold,
And solitary he was ever alone,
And waking all the night making moan.
All make leanness, want of appetite, want of sleep ordinary symptoms, and by that means they are brought often so low, so much altered and changed, that … “one scarce know them to be the same men” …
… But the symptoms of the mind in lovers are almost infinite, and so diverse, that no art can comprehend them; though they be merry sometimes, and rapt beyond themselves for joy: yet most part, love is a plague, a torture, a hell, a bitter sweet passion at last … like a summer fly or sphinx's wings, or a rainbow of all colours … fair, foul, and full of variation, though most part irksome and bad. For in a word, the Spanish Inquisition is not comparable to it …