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and blushes, as well as of that which never told its tale; of the love which Milton thought worthy of being described in its purest, holiest character; and of the love which lives and glows in the pages of every poet from Milton down to Byron, Burns, and Moore.

we may learn what are the component parts of a flower, but this alone will never make us sensible of its beauty. The same power may collect and disseminate the truths most important to the well being of society, but it cannot enforce their reception. In short, though it may instruct, improve, invigorate, and supply the mind with a perpetual fund of information, intellectual power alone can never make a poet, nor excite that love of poetrythat ardent desire in the soul for what it feeds on, which gives to the poetic mind a refinement, an energy, and a sense of happiness unknown to that which subsists merely upon knowledge. Hence we may fairly conclude, that the man who is wholly dispassionate himself, and who has neither observed, nor studied the nature of passion in others, can never be a poet; any more than the artist who has never felt the exhilarationing to certain modifications; it follows thereof joy, nor witnessed its effects, can represent in painting or marble a personification of delight.

That all who have touched the poet's magic pen, have at one time or other of their lives made love their theme, and that they have bestowed upon this theme their highest powers, is proof sufficient to establish the fact that love is of all the passions the most poetical; a fact in no way contradicted or affected by the vulgar profanation to which this theme more than any other has been subjected. All human beings are not capable of ambition, of envy, of hate, or indeed of any other passion; but all are capable of love, in a greater or less degree, and accord

fore as a necessary consequence, that love should form a favourite and familiar theme, with multitudes who know nothing of its refinements, and high capabilities.

The universal tendency of love to exalt its object, is a fact which at once gives it importance, dignity, and refinement. Importance because of its prevalence amongst mankind; dignity, because whatever raises the tone of moral feeling, and disposes to

To examine the passions individually would be a work of time and patience, or rather of impatience. We will therefore dismiss those which are malevolent or injurious to the peace of society; for though rage, envy, malice, jealousy, and above all the master passion of revenge, may supply the poet with images of majesty, and hor-wards kindly thoughts of our fellow-crearor, which give to the productions of his genius a character of depth and power; yet as those to which we are about to turn our attention are so much more congenial to the peaceful spirit of the muse, we will devote our time solely to the consideration of the poetry of love, and grief.

First then we begin with love; a subject hourly trampled in the dust, and yet hourly rising from its degredation with fresh life, and fresh vigour, to claim, in spite of the perpetual profanation of vulgar familiarity, the best and warmest tribute of the poet's lay. By love I do not mean that moderate but high-toned attachment which may be classed under the general head of affection -of this hereafter. For the present I am daring enough to speak in plain prose, and even in this enlightened day, of the love of May-day queens, and village swains; of the love of Damon and Delias; of the love which speaks in the common-place of sighs

tures, must be conducive to the good of society; and refinement because it enters into the secrets of social intercourse, and delights in nothing so much as communicating the happiness it derives from all that is most admirable in art and nature. If that is a contemptible or insignificant passion under whose influence more has been dared, and done, and suffered, than under any other; then is the human mind itself contemptible, and the name of insignificance may very properly be applied to all those impulses of human nature which have given rise to the revolutions of past ages, and the most conspicuous events which mark the history of the world.

It seems to me that love originates in a mixture of admiration and pity. Without some feeling of admiration, no sentient being could first begin to love; and without some touch of pity, love would be deficient in its character of tenderness, and that irre

sistible desire to serve the object, which impels to the most extraordinary acts of disinterestedness and devotion. I grant that after love has once taken possession of the heart, it becomes a sort of instinct, and can then maintain an existence too miserable, and degraded, for a name, long after admiration and even pity have become extinct. But in the first instance there must be some quality we admire to attract our attention and win our favour, and there must be some deficiency in the happiness of this object, which we think we can supply, or we should never dream of attaching ourselves to it. It may be asked since love sometimes fixes itself upon an inferior object, degraded below the possession of dignity or virtue, where then can be the admiration? I answer, that in such cases the mind that loves must be degraded too, and consequently it is subject to call evil good, and may thus discover qualities admirable to its perverted vision, which a more discriminating eye would turn from with disgust. Again, it is still more reasonable to ask when love is fixed upon an object apparently the centre of happiness, to which prosperity in every shape is ministering, where then can be the pity? We all know that the appearance of happiness is deceitful, and we all suspect that even under the most flattering aspect, there is a mingled yarn in the web of life, which renders the experience of others, like our own, a mixture of joy and sorrow; but if a being can be found in whose happiness is no broken link, no chord unstrung, who has no false friend, no flattering enemy, no threatening of infirmity, no flaw in worldly comfort and security; I would answer the question by asking, is human happiness of so firm and durable a nature that once established, it remains unshaken? No; the summit of earthly felicity is one of such perilous attainment, that the nearer we see any one approaching it, the more we long to protect them from the danger to come-to stretch out our arms, and if we cannot prevent, at least to break their fall. We feel towards such an one, that the day will come when they may want a real friend, a firm support, a true comforter, and we hasten the bond that unites our fate with theirs, that we may be ready in the days of "trial and wo."

If admiration did not form a competent part of our love, we should not feel so ardent a desire as is generally evinced, to obtain for the object beloved, the admiration of others. We long for others to behold them with our eyes, that they may participate in our feelings and do what we consider justice to the idols of our imagination; and though this can seldom be the case to the extent of our wishes, we know that to listen to the well-merited praises of those we love, is (at least to women) the most intense enjoyment this world can afford. To purchase this gratification what anxiety we endure, what study we bestow, what ardent desire we experience, that they may commit no errors cognizable to the world's eye; but steering an open, honourable, upright course, may defy the scrutiny of envious eyes, and claim as their due from society at large, that tribute of admiration which we are ever ready to bestow. But the unspeakable anguish with which we behold any departure from this honourable course of conduct, is perhaps the strongest proof, how intimately our sense of all that is admirable in the human character is interwoven with our affections. I do not pretend to say, that we are all so influenced by right feeling, or so well assured of the precise line of demarcation between good and evil, as to lament over the errors of those we love, exactly in prʊportion to their moral culpability. Far from it. But let that which all hearts can feellet the stigma of the world's disgrace fall upon them-let it at the same time be voluntarily incurred, and richly merited, and ye who tell us of the loss of friends or fortune, of poverty, or sickness or death, match the agony of this conviction if you can. No; it has neither companion nor similitude. In the wide range of human calamity there is not one that bears any proportion to this.

It may be said of pity also, that there are cases in which we are scarcely aware of its forming any part of our love; but is not our love at such times languid, spiritless, and inert? No sooner does sickness or misfortune assail the object of our regard, than it assumes a new life, and all that was dear before, becomes doubly valuable beneath the pressure of affliction, or on the brink of the grave. How often has pity brought to light

a love whose existence we were unconscious of before; and those whom we should once have deemed it impossible to regard with tenderness, have become, under the shadow of misfortune, the objects of our most devoted affection.

The power which love possesses of enhancing our enjoyments, is of itself sufficient to entitle this sentiment to a high place amongst those that are most influential in their operations upon the human mind. I appeal to the young, or rather to the old who have not forgotten their youth, whether love has not at some period of their existence, given a life and vividness to the aspect of creation, a music to sound, and an intensity to all their capabilities of simple and natural delight, which, while the enchantment lasted, seemed to raise the pleasures of earth above this sublunary sphere, though in remembrance it claims nothing but a passing smile, or perhaps a faint sigh of regret, that we have lost so much of what constitued the life of our early existence. We smile because we have lived to awake from our delusion to know that the sunshine which then appeared to us a flood of radiance pouring its golden streams over hill and grove, and diffusing the principle of happiness through all the secret mysteries of nature, was but the ordinary light of day, liable to be obscured by mists, and hid from us by the intervention of dense snd gloomy clouds. We smile because the brook that murmured at our feet with such continuous and unbroken melody, to our young imaginations pure, and clear, and vivid, like the secret springs of unsophisticated feeling, since then has wearied us with the constant monotony of its sound, seeming to tell of little else than pebbles and clear water. We smile, because the song of at least half the birds whose voices were then all music, has degenerated into a mere chirp; but most of all we smile, because that bright being whose brow was garnished with a glory-at whose feet we would have laid the accumulated treasures of the whole world had we possessed them-the idol whom irreligiously we had placed upon the high altar of the soul, has stepped down from that exalted pedestal, and passing forth into the world endowed only with the customary functions

of humanity, has mixed in the common avocations of life, and become

"An eating, drinking, bargain-making man."

Or if after such a retrospection, perchance we sigh, it is not so much with any positive regret, as with a vague sense of some indefinite loss-a mere illusion—a false colouring -a deceitful tone-an evanescent charm which owed its existence to the infatuation of the mind, and yet we sigh; because not the longest period of man's natural life, not the rapid and entire success of all our schemes, not the riches of prosperity poured into our lap, around our feet, and even beyond the circle of our hopes, can restore what is lost to us, when we are driven to the conviction that we can love no more. It was an idle phantasy, we tell ourselves in after life, and we join in the ridicule that reprobates this foolish passion; but would we not give all that time and tears have purchased for us, to sit again in the bright sunshine, to look round upon the fields and the woods, to listen to the singing of the birds, and without the excitement of art, or the aid of borrowed attributes, to feel each individual moment sufficient in its fulness of felicity to lull the memory of the past, and soothe down the anxieties of the future, concentrating into one point of present time, all that we spend after years in search of, and realizing without purchase, and without sacrifice, in one single isolated particle of blissful experience, the happiness for which countless myriads are pining in vain.

It is a strong proof of the poetical character of love, that all the contempt, and all the ridicule it meets with in the world, are unable to deprive it of the legitimate place which it holds in the popular works of our best authors. Caleb Williams is the only novel that occurs to me, in which the interest of the story is in no way connected with love. The author has supplied this deficiency, by conducting the reader through his pages with an intensity of anxiety, scarcely equalled elsewhere; but well as this story is penned, we arrive in the end at the unsatisfactory conviction, that we have been reading an uncongenial, hard, bad book, the whole tenor of which is in direct opposition to the good providence of God. It may be remarked, in

sneers of his enemies. The loves of Blackeyed Susan, Will Watch, and Roderick Random, are more pleasing to John Bull; because such is his extreme sensitiveness on the score of ridicule, that as soon as the fatal smile appears, love, such as it is in these and similar productions, can be dismissed altogether as a joke, and no more need be said or done about it. But to be convicted of sentimentality-to be detected in the act of exhibiting or infusing, pathos, would be a dilemma as unprecedented, as insupportable to that powerful subborn genius, the grand aim of whose life is never to commit himself; and that man is unquestionably committed-committed beyond the power of redemption, who writes a book about love. Still even to critics-to John Bull, who on the score of non-commitment, constitutes himself the chief of critics, love must be allowed to have the power of developing human character beyond what is possessed by any other passion, sentiment, or feeling.

connexion with the same fact, that Sir Walter Scott after he had spell-bound the public by the easy natural flow of his first poems, tried his skill upon the battle of Waterloo, and produced one which it is difficult to read, though the same master hand is there. He has since atoned for this want of fealty to the tender passion, by the most delicate and judicious distribution of it through the whole of his novels, where we find always enough, and (what is saying a great deal for the writer). never too much. At the same time however that love forms an essential part in our popular works of fiction, it seems to be inconsistent with the genius of the English nation, to make it the entire, or even the leading subject of any particular work. Richardson approaches the nearest to this extreme, but his novels are more remarkable in this day, for presenting minute descriptions of human character, of the social habits and customs of the times in which he lived, than as dissertations upon love. Miss Porter, kind as she is in mating all her characters, and marching them off the stage in couples, gives us battles innumerable, with lively exhibitions of valour, patriotism, and various other passions, good and evil, among which her love scenes form a very small, and certainly a very inferior part. And Missing them separately upon the tablet of Edgeworth, "the great enchantress," who manages love with more tact, and often with exquisite pathos, introduces it always with due subserviency to that substantial, sound moral, which to the honour of her sex and the benefit of her fellow-creatures, she makes the chief object of her clear, well regulated, and comprehensive mind.

We have no work in our language which bears any resemblance to the sorrows of Werter or to Corinne, each admirable in their way, and far above the praise of an ordinary pen. No Englishman could possibly have written either. He could not have resigned himself so entirely to any subject of a tender and evanescent nature, as to have studied it metaphysically. The spirit of sarcasm is so predominant in the English constitution, that he would have laughed at his work before it was half completed, and the other half would have remained unfinished, for fear of bringing upon himself the contempt of his friends, and the

There is a class of beings so numerous that they form a very important, and in many respects a very useful part of society, who can listen to the most enchanting music, with ears, and thoughts, and memory alive only to the sound of individual notes, imprint

their minds, in order that they may be carried home, pricked down upon paper, and played upon their own pianos; or who on beholding the finest specimens of ancient painting, or sculpture, immediately-before they have had time to take in the whole view, snatch out the ready sketch-book, and with that energy which men exhibit in associating themselves and their own powers with all that they admire, apply the busy pencil to the outline, in order that they may exhibit to their wondering friends a pattern of the colouring of the ancients, of a Roman sandal, or a Grecian nose. Even by this class of beings, the most impervious to the tender passion, love must be acknowledged to be a fine study, because it draws forth the cara- | bilities of the human mind, and brings forward its leading features into a strong light.

The first effect which love produces upon the imagination is that of exalting or ennobling its object, and upon the principle of adaptation, it consequently extends a similar

in a language simple and familiar, scarcely admitting of poetical ornament, except in memory or imagination; and as the drama compels all persons to speak for themselves, almost exclusively from the impulse of the moment, they can only speak of love in the colloquial language of the day, which language changing with the tastes and fashions of the world, that of Shakespeare's dra

influence over the mind where it exists. Under favorable circumstances, and before it reaches the crisis of its fate, it has a natural tendency to smooth down the asperities of the temper, to soften the manners, and to diffuse a general feeling of cheerfulness and good will even beyond the sphere of its immediate object. But under circumstances of an opposite description, love is remarkable for exhibiting in its train all the evil and frail-matic characters, when they speak of love is ty which belong to our nature. We are seldom betrayed by any other passion to throw aside entirely that veil, beyond which pride conceals her hidden store of private faults and follies. But love is stronger than pride; and it is besides so absorbing in its nature, that we are apt to forget while devoting ourselves to one object, the figure we are exhibiting to the eyes of the world, the secrets we are disclosing, and the open revelation we are making of our "heart of hearts."

"Love," says a popular and powerful writer, "is a very noble and exalting sentiment in its first germ and principle. We never loved without arraying the object in all the glories of moral as well as physical perfection, and deriving a kind of dignity to ourselves from our capacity of admiring a creature so excellent and dignified; but this lavish and magnificent prodigality of the imagination often leaves the heart a bankrupt. Love in its iron age of disappointment becomes very degraded-it submits to be satisfied with merely external indulgences a look-a touch of the hand, though occurring by accident-a kind word, though uttered almost unconsciously, suffices for its humble existence. In its first state, it is like man before the fall, inhaling the odours of paradise, and enjoying the communion of the Deity; in the latter, it is like the same being toiling amid the briar and the thistle, barely to maintain a squalid existence, without enjoyment, utility, or loveliness."

Shakespeare has done little towards giving dignity to this passion, though he seems to have been intimately acquainted with its influence upon the human mind. The reaso is obvious. Love is a familiar feeling, associating itself with mankind in their daily walk, and entering into the ordinary and domestic scenes of life; it therefore speaks

not only offensive to modern ears, but de-
grading to the sentiment itself—a sentiment
which always maintains the most elevated
character where the proprieties of life are
most scrupulously observed, and the stand-
ard of moral feeling is the highest. Yet
Shakespeare has left a striking proof that he
could reverence this feeling, in the following
beautiful stanza.

"Let me not to the marriage of true minds,
Admit impediments. Love is not love
That alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.
Oh! no! it is an ever fixed mark,

That looks on tempest and is never shaken:
It is the star of every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown although its height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom."

It would be wholly at variance with nature, were the poet to make his characters speak in tropes and metaphors, with classical allusions, and rounded periods, of the passion whose powerful influence was then upon them. No man ever yet could speak or write poetically, for any length of time, of the love he was then experiencing. Thus it is only by occasional touches of feeling that burst upon us in all their genuine intensity, that the depth of the sentiment is discovered. Our language may be forcible and affecting, but it is impossible that it should be elaborate when we are feeling acutely; and there is a certain identity with self; an exclusiveness, giving something like sacredness to the sensations which belong to love, that renders an open, full, unsparing exposure of it repulsive, even in the pages of the poet. It is this sacredness, which, above all other things constitutes the poetry of love. Those who live under its influence possess, so long as that influence lasts, a secret treasure, and often betray by their inadvertent

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