that conception of love which springs into being in the last canto of
Dante's _Purgatory_,--which finds in English chivalry a noble voice,--

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

[Footnote 5: _Laodamia_ should be read (as it is given in
Mr. Matthew Arnold's admirable volume of selections) with the _earlier_
conclusion: the _second_ form is less satisfactory, and the _third_,
with its sermonizing tone, "thus all in vain exhorted and reproved,"
is worst of all.]

For, indeed, (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splendour of
Truth,) so such a Love as this is the splendour of Virtue; it is the
unexpected spark that flashes from self-forgetful soul to soul, it
is man's standing evidence that he "must lose himself to find himself,"
and that only when the veil of his personality has lifted from around
him can he recognize that he is already in heaven.

In a second poem inspired by this revived study of classical
antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of Dion,--the worthy
pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler of Syracuse, who allowed
himself to shed blood unjustly, though for the public good, and was
haunted by a spectre symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion
was assassinated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate seem
to me to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint with a
touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of Death himself a
deliverer, and has its strength in the unseen.

So were the hopeless troubles, that involved