Pauline a divine model of the love which inspires great deeds and
accompanies great virtues. Thus did Shakspeare, in his portrait of
Portia, show the blended generosity and simplicity of a woman's soul:--

"For you [my Lord Bassanio]
I would be trebled twenty times myself;
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times more rich;"

or, in his still more beautiful delineation of Juliet, paint an
absorbing devotion:--

"My bounty is as boundless as the sea,
My love as deep; the more I give to thee,
The more I have, for both are infinite."

Thus did Milton, in his transcendent epic, show how a Paradise was
regained when woman gave her generous sympathy to man, and reproduced
for all coming ages the image of Spiritual Love,--the inamorata of Dante
and Petrarch, the inspired and consoling guide.

But the muse of the poets, even when sanctified by Christianity, never
sang such an immortal love as the Middle Ages in sober prose have handed
down in the history of Héloïse,--the struggle between the two Venuses of
Socrates, and the final victory of Urania, though not till after the
temporary triumph of Polyhymnia,--the inamorata of earth clad in the
vestments of a sanctified recluse, and purified by the chastisements of
Heaven. "Saint Theresa dies longing to join her divine spouse; but Saint
Theresa is only a Héloïse looking towards heaven." Héloïse has an
earthly idol; but her devotion has in it all the elements of a
supernatural fervor,--the crucifixion of self in the glory of him she