waits him, nor below
Can love, or sorrow, fame, ambition, strife,
Cut to his heart again with the keen knife
Of silent, sharp endurance.

The very imitative hero of Praed's _The Troubadour_, after
disappointment in several successive amours, at the age of twenty-six
dismisses passion forever. We are assured that

The joys that wound, the pains that bless,
Were all, were all departed,
And he was wise and passionless
And happy and cold-hearted.

The popularity of this sort of poet was, however, ephemeral. Of late
years poets have shown nothing but contempt for their brothers who
attempt to sing after their passion has died away. It seems likely,
beside, that instead of giving an account of his genius, the depleted
poet depicts his passionless state only as a ruse to gain the sympathy
of his readers, reminding them how much greater he might have been if he
had not wantonly wasted his emotions.

One is justified in asking why, on the other hand, the poet should not
be one who, instead of spending his love on a finite mistress, should
devote it all to poetry. The bard asks us to believe that love of poetry
is as thrilling a passion as any earthly one. His usual emotions are
portrayed in Alexander Smith's _Life Drama_, where the hero agonizes for
relief from his too ardent love:

O that my heart was quiet as a grave
Asleep in moonlight!
For, as a torrid sunset boils with gold
Up to the zenith, fierce within my soul
A passion burns from basement to the cope.
Poesy, poesy!
But one who imagines that this passion can exist in the soul wholly
unrelated to any other, is confusing poetry with religion, or possibly
with philosophy. The medieval saint was pure in proportion as he died to
the life of the senses. This is likewise the state of the philosopher
described in the _Phaedo_. But beauty, unlike wisdom and goodness,
is not to be apprehended abstractly; ideal beauty is super-sensual, to
be sure, but the way to vision of it is through the senses. Without
doubt one occasionally finds asceticism preached to the poet in verse.
One of our minor American poets declares,

The bard who yields to flesh his emotion
Knows naught of the frenzy divine.
[Footnote: _Passion_, by Elizabeth Cheney. But compare Keats' protest
against the poet's abstract love, in the fourth book of _Endymion_.]

But this is not the genuine poet's point of view. In so far as he is a
Platonist--and "all poets are more or l