"I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more."


Or the address of the Commonwealth's man to his wife, as she looked
out from the Tower window to see him, for the last time, on his way to
the scaffold. He stood up in the cart, waved his hat, and cried, "To
Heaven, my love, to Heaven, and leave you in the storm!"

Such was the love of faith and honor,--a love which stopped, like
Colonel Hutchinson's, "on this side idolatry," because it was
religious. The meeting of two such souls Donne describes as giving
birth to an "abler soul."

Lord Herbert wrote to his love,

"Were not our souls immortal made,
Our equal loves can make them such."


In the "Broken Heart," of Ford, Penthea, a character which engages my
admiration even more deeply than the famous one of Calanthe, is made
to present to the mind the most beautiful picture of what these
relations should be in their purity. Her life cannot sustain the
violation of what she so clearly feels.

Shakspeare, too, saw that, in true love, as in fire, the utmost ardor
is coincident with the utmost purity. It is a true lover that exclaims
in the agony of Othello,