complexion and degree in every country and in every age; so also, and
consequently, is the love of the imagination. As a proof, observe that
you sympathize with the romantic love of other times or nations only in
proportion as you sympathize with their poetry and imaginative
literature. The love which stalks through the "Arcadia" or "Amadis of
Gaul" is to the great bulk of readers coldly insipid or solemnly
ridiculous. Alas! when those works excited enthusiasm, so did the love
which they describe. The long speeches, the icy compliments, expressed
the feeling of the day. The love madrigals of the time of Shenstone, or
the brocade gallantries of the French poets in the last century, any
woman now would consider hollow or childish, imbecile or artificial.
Once the songs were natural, and the love seductive. And now, my young
friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the
love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous
through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and
so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies,
and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star,--all that love
too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young
aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye
now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where
Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before,--go with the
Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric
"most beauteous princesses!" The only love-poetry that stands through all
time and appeals to all hearts is that which is founded on either or both
the species of love natural to all men,--the love of the senses, and the
love of custom. In the latter is included what middle-aged men call the
rational attachment, the charm of congenial minds, as well as the homely
and warmer accumulation of little memories of simple kindness, or the
mere brute habitude of seeing a face as one would see a chair. These,
sometimes singly, sometimes skilfully blended, make the theme of those