Then let come what come may,
What matter if I go mad,
I shall have had my day.

Let the sweet heavens endure,
Not close and darken above me
Before I am quite, quite sure
That there is one to love me;
Then let come what come may
To a life that has been so sad,
I shall have had my day.

The feeling of the lover is that no matter what happens afterwards, the
winning of the woman is enough to pay for life, death, pain, or anything
else. One of the most remarkable phenomena of the illusion is the supreme
indifference to consequences--at least to any consequences which would not
signify moral shame or loss of honour, Of course the poet is supposed to
consider the emotion only in generous natures. But the subject of this
splendid indifference has been more wonderfully treated by Victor Hugo
than by Tennyson--as we shall see later on, when considering another phase
of the emotion. Before doing that, I want to call your attention to a very
charming treatment of love's romance by an American. It is one of the most
delicate of modern compositions, and it is likely to become a classic, as
it has already been printed in four or five different anthologies. The
title is "Atalanta's Race."

First let me tell you the story of Atalanta, so that you will be better
able to see the fine symbolism of the poem. Atalanta, the daughter of a
Greek king, was not only the most beautiful of maidens, but the swiftest
runner in the world. She passed her time in hunting, and did not wish to