is preparing "with his warm hands our couch;" and so intense grows the poet's enthusiasm at this information that he exclaims, wildly addressing his lady in Sonnet II.,—
"O thou who at Love's hour ecstatically
Unto my lips dost evermore present
The body and blood of Love in Sacrament!"
—which is a pretty good beginning, quite apart from the blasphemy, for a writer in whose eyes a "beauty of natural universal function" is merely a "harmonious concomitant" of higher things. Sonnet III., entitled "Love's Light," describes harmlessly enough how,
"—in the dark hours (we two alone)
Close kissed and eloquent of still replies
Thy twilight-hidden glimmering visage lies;"
but in Sonnet IV, another and higher stage is reached, for the lady gives her lover a "consonant interlude" (which is the Fleshly for "kiss"), and—"somewhat figuratively, it is true, but unmistakably"—proceeds, as a mother suckles a baby, to afford him full fruition:—
"I was a child beneath her touch (!),—a man
When breast to breast we clung, even I and she,—
A spirit when her spirit lookt thro' me,—
A god when all our life-breath met to fan
Our life-blood, till love's emulous ardours ran,
Fire within fire, desire in deity."
O malignant critic, who has dared to attaint the author of these sweet lines of "fleshliness!" Let the reader examine this passage phrase by phrase and word by word, dwelling particularly on the descriptive animalism of the last three lines. Why, much the same charge might be brought against that delicious effort of Thomas Carew, entitled "The Rapture,"
