Lord Spencer, who never wrote any poetry at all; while her lover said his last good-bye in the most sparkling and heart-whole letter ever penned by inconstant man. What would the author of "The Girdle," and "Go, Lovely Rose," have thought of Browning's uneasy rapture?
O lyric love, half angel and half bird,
And all a wonder and a wild desire.
He would probably have pointed out the exaggeration of the sentiment, and the corresponding looseness of the lines. He would certainly have agreed with the verdict of M. Sévelinges, had that acute critic uttered it in his day. "It is well," says M. Sévelinges, "that passionate love is rare. Its principal effect is to detach men from all their surroundings, to isolate them, to render them independent of the relations which they have not formed for themselves; and a civilized society composed of lovers would return infallibly to misery and barbarism."
Here is the French point of view, expressed with that lucidity which the nation so highly esteems. Who shall gainsay its correctness? But the Saxon, like the Teuton, is sentimental to his heart's core, and finds some illusions
