it is clever: but like
mathematics, an explanation of the brain rather than the heart.
Something is missing. For Plato, almost always delicate and subtle, is
never tender: the reason is, that he was atrophied on the feminine side:
he does not consequently understand sex, being himself only half a man:
that is, only man and nothing more. But all the really great imaginative
men are bi-sexual: they have a large ingredient of woman in their
composition, which gives to their divination an extra touch of something
that others cannot reach. And so, with equal poetry, yet with a pathos
infinitely deeper, our Milton makes Love the child of Loneliness:[2] a
parentage evinced by the terrible melancholy of Love when he cannot find
his proper object, and the blank desolation and despair of the frightful
void and blackness left behind, when he has lost it. But now, it is
just this intolerable loneliness which makes him idealise the
commonplace, and see all things in the light of his own yearning,
creating for himself visions of unimaginable happiness, which presently
vanish, to resolve his Eden into nothing, and leave him, with no
companion but the horror of his own intensified isolation, in the sand.
A situation, which hardly any lover that really is a lover can endure,
without going mad. They are very shallow theologians, who by way of
pandering to sentimental prejudices make the essence of the Deity to
consist in Love. Poor Deity! his life would be a Hell, past all human
imagination: an everlasting Loneliness, with no prospect of release. For
it is precisely to escape from this hell that so many forlorn lovers
take refuge in the tomb: a resource not available to those who cannot
die. Death is not always terrible: sometimes he is kind.

[Footnote 2: In his _Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_.]

* * * * *

Such then is the theme of _Bubbles of the Foam_: a little love-story,
whose title, like that of all her elder sisters, has in the original a
double application, by reason of the ambiguity of the last word, to
Love, and to the Moon. We might also render it, _A Heavenly Bubble_, or,
_Love is a Bubble_, or _Nothing but a Bubble_, or _A Bubble of the
World_,[3] thinking either of Love or the Moon. For the Moon, like the
goddess of Love, rose originally from the sea: and they retain traces of
their origin, both in their essence and their appearance. For what is
more like a great Foam-Bubble than the