imagination wanders between a wild sensuality,--so lubricious in its
suggestions, now and then, as to occasion gossip to the effect that he
had become a libertine,--and a sublimated philosophy based on Platonic
conceptions of a prenatal existence, or upon Leibnitzian conceptions of
a pre-established harmony. But while the Laura poems are sufficiently
sensual, they are not sensuous; or if they try to be, the sensuous
element is unreal and unimaginable. Some of them, with their
overstrained vehemence of expression, their fervid and far-fetched
tropes, their involved and sometimes obscure diction, are little more
than intellectual puzzles: they so occupy the mind in the mere effort of
comprehension that little room is left for any emotion whatever. They
leave one altogether cold.

A 'Fantasie to Laura' identifies the rapturous passion with the force of
gravitation which holds planets and systems in order. 'Blot it out from
the mechanism of nature and the All bursts asunder in fragments; your
worlds thunder into chaos; weep, Newtons, for their giant fall!' And
then Laura's kiss!

Aus den Schranken schwellen alle Sehnen,
Seine Ufer ueberwallt das Blut;
Koerper will in Koerper ueberstuerzen,
Lodern Seelen in vereinter Glut.[38]

When Laura plays the piano, her adorer stands there, one moment an
exanimate statue, the next a disembodied spirit,--while the listening
zephyrs murmur more softly in reverence. In a 'Reproach to Laura' she is
taxed with being the ruin of her lover's ambition. Because of her the
'giant has shriveled to a dwarf'. She has 'blown away the mountains',
that he had 'rolled up' to the sunny heights of glory. In another poem,