eflected and whose
ideas passed on through him to Spenser, are to us simply strange and
abnormal states through which society has passed, to us beyond
understanding and almost belief. The perpetual love-making, as one of
the first duties and necessities of a noble life, the space which it
must fill in the cares and thoughts of all gentle and high-reaching
spirits, the unrestrained language of admiration and worship, the
unrestrained yielding to the impulses, the anxieties, the pitiable
despair and agonies of love, the subordination to it of all other
pursuits and aims, the weeping and wailing and self-torturing which it
involves, all this is so far apart from what we know of actual life, the
life not merely of work and business, but the life of affection, and
even of passion, that it makes the picture of which it is so necessary a
part, seem to us in the last degree, unreal, unimaginable, grotesquely
ridiculous. The quaint love sometimes found among children, so quickly
kindled, so superficial, so violent in its language and absurd in its
plans, is transferred with the utmost gravity to the serious proceedings
of the wise and good. In the highest characters it is chastened,
refined, purified: it appropriates, indeed, language due only to the
divine, it almost simulates idolatry; yet it belongs to the best part of
man's nature. But in the lower and average characters, it is not so
respectable; it is apt to pass into mere toying pastime and frivolous
love of pleasure: it astonishes us often by the readiness with which it
displays an affinity for the sensual and impure, the corrupting and
debasing sides of the relations between the sexes. But however it
appears, it is throughout a very great affair, not merely with certain
persons, or under certain circumstances, but with every one: it obtrudes
itself in public, as the natural and recognized motive of plans of life
and trials of strength; it is the great spur of enterprise, and its
highest and most glorious reward. A world of which this is the law, is
not even in fiction a world which we can conceive possible, or with
which experience enables us to sympathize.

It is, of course, a purely artificial and conventional reading of the
facts of human life and feeling. Such conventional readings and
renderings belong in a measure to all art; but in its highest forms they
are corrected, interpreted, supplemented by the presence of interspersed
realities which every one recognizes.