notion of a valuable contrast to be established between love and
friendship, and a tribute to be paid to the kindly offices of the
latter. The verses wherein she gave effect to this idea make a
poor sequel; friendship, when it is personified and set beside the
tyrant god, wears very much the air of a benevolent county
magistrate, whose chief duty is to keep the peace.

Figures of this sort are in no sense removable decorations, they
are at one with the substance of the thought to be expressed, and
are entitled to the large control they claim. Imagination, working
at white heat, can fairly subdue the matter of the poem to them, or
fuse them with others of the like temper, striking unity out of the
composite mass. One thing only is forbidden, to treat these
substantial and living metaphors as if they were elegant
curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over abruptly on
the way to more exacting topics. The mystics, and the mystical
poets, knew better than to countenance this frivolity. Recognising
that there is a profound and intimate correspondence between all
physical manifestations and the life of the soul, they flung the
reins on the neck of metaphor in the hope that it might carry them
over that mysterious frontier. Their failures and misadventures,
familiarly despised as "conceits," left them floundering in
absurdity. Yet not since the time of Donne and Crashaw has the
full power and significance of figurative language been realised in
English poetry. These poets, like some of their late descendants,
were tortured by a sense of hidden meaning, and were often content
with analogies that admit of no rigorous explanation. They were
convinced that all intellectual truth is a parable, though its
inner meaning be dark or dubious. The philosophy of friendship
deals with those mathematical and physical conceptions of distance,