,
experience a kind of cosmic emotion; and Victor Hugo's little poem
illustrates this. Night and the stars and the abyss of the sky all seem to
be thrilling with love and beauty to the lover's eyes, because he himself
is in a state of loving happiness; and then he begins to think about his
relation to the universal life, to the supreme mystery beyond all Form and
Name.

A third or fourth class of such emotion may be illustrated by the
beautiful sonnet of Keats, written not long before his death. Only a very
young man could have written this, because only a very young man loves in
this way--but how delightful it is! It has no title.

Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priest-like task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--

No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.

Tennyson has charmingly represented a lover wishing that he were a
necklace of his beloved, or her girdle, or her earring; but that is not a
cosmic emotion at all. Indeed, the idea of Tennyson's pretty song was
taken from old French and English love songs of the peasants--popular
ballads. But in this beautiful sonnet of Keats, where the lover wishes to
be endowed with the immortality and likeness of a star only to be forever
with the beloved, there is something of the old Greek thought which
inspired the beautiful lines written between two and three thousand years
ago, and translated by J.A. Symonds:

Gazing on stars, my Star? Would that I were the welkin,
Starry with myriad eyes, ever to gave upon thee!

But there is more than the Greek beauty of thought in Keats's sonnet, for
we find the poet speaking of the exterior universe in the largest
relation, thinking of the stars watching forever the rising and the
falling of the sea tides, thinking of the sea tides themselves as
continually purifying the world, even as a priest purifies a temple. The
fancy of the boy expands to the fancy of philosophy; it is a blending of
poetry, philosophy, and sincere emoti