proper beauty to details of the common life, the common day. The poet
spoke of his love, not as a flower to place in his bosom, or hold
carelessly in his hand, but as a light toward which he must find wings
to fly, or "a stair to heaven." He delighted to speak of her, not only
as the bride of his heart, but the mother of his soul; for he saw
that, in cases where the right direction had been taken, the greater
delicacy of her frame and stillness of her life left her more open
than is Man to spiritual influx. So he did not look upon her as
betwixt him and earth, to serve his temporal needs, but, rather,
betwixt him and heaven, to purify his affections and lead him to
wisdom through love. He sought, in her, not so much the Eve as the
Madonna.

In these minds the thought, which gleams through all the legends of
chivalry, shines in broad intellectual effulgence, not to be
misinterpreted; and their thought is reverenced by the world, though
it lies far from the practice of the world as yet,--so far that it
seems as though a gulf of death yawned between.

Even with such men the practice was, often, widely different from the
mental faith. I say mental; for if the heart were thoroughly alive
with it, the practice could not be dissonant. Lord Herbert's was a
marriage of convention, made for him at fifteen; he was not
discontented with it, but looked only to the advantages it brought of
perpetuating his family on the basis of a great fortune. He paid, in
act, what he considered a dutiful attention to the bond; his thoughts
travelled elsewhere; and while forming a high ideal of the
companionship of minds in marriage, he seems never to have doubted
that its realization must be postponed to some other state of being.
Dante, almost immediately after the death of Beatrice, married a lady