his actual expressions, have the closest parallel in poets of the
fourteenth century who had never read a line of his work nor heard of
his name. As in them, the religion of love is reduced to a theology;
no subtlety, no fluctuation of fancy or passion is left unregistered,
alike in their lighter and their graver moods. Sometimes the feeling
is buried in masses of conceits, sometimes it is eagerly passionate,
but even then always with an imaginative and florid passion, never
directly as Sappho or Catullus is direct. Love appears in a hundred
shapes amidst a shower of fantastic titles and attributes. Out of all
the epithets that Meleager coins for him, one, set in a line of
hauntingly liquid and languid rhythm, "delicate-sandalled,"[15] gives
the key-note to the rest. Or again, he often calls him {glukupikros},
"bittersweet";[16] at first he is like wine mingled with honey for
sweetness, but as he grows and becomes more tyrannous, his honey
scorches and stings; and the lover, "set on fire and drenched to
swooning with his ointments," drinks from a deeper cup and mingles his
wine with burning tears.[17] Love the Reveller goes masking with the
lover through stormy winter nights;[18] Love the Ball-player tosses
hearts for balls in his hands;[19] Love the Runaway lies hidden in a
lady's eyes;[20] Love the Healer soothes with a touch the wound that
his own dart has made;[21] Love the Artist sets his signature beneath
the soul which he has created;[22] Love the Helmsman steers the soul,
like a winged boat, over the perilous seas of desire;[23] Love the
Child, playing idly with his dice at sundawn, throws lightly for human
lives.[24] Now he is a winged boy with childish bow and quiver, swift
of laughter and speech and tears;[25] now a fierce god with flaming
arrows, before whom life wastes away like wax in the fire, Love the
terrible, Love the slayer of men.[26] The air all round him is heavy
with the scent of flowers and ointments; violets and myrtle, narcissus
and lilies, are woven into his garlands, and the rose, "lover-loving"