Complete. From “Essays and Marginalia.”

LOVE is certainly a poetical subject. All poets who deserve the name are, or have been, lovers; and a considerable portion wish to be poets. How comes it, then, that of the innumerable amatory effusions which comprise more than half the minor literature of the world, so few are even tolerable. If the lover would but express his real feelings in plain language, with such figures, and such only, as the passion spontaneously suggested, surely we should have sense at least, if not poetry. But a notion long prevailed that poetry must be something different from sense, and that love must be irrational because it is sometimes indiscreet. Love is a divinity; therefore, it must talk as unintelligibly as the Pythian Prophetess. He is a child; therefore, it is proper he should whine and babble: or, to speak less like a pagan, it is too genteel an emotion to call anything by its proper name. Love poets seem to have borrowed from the amorous Italians a fashion of paying their addresses in masquerade. The fair lady is changed into a nymph, a siren, a goddess, a shepherdess, or a queen. She lives upon air, like the chameleon, or on dew, like the grasshopper. Like the bird of paradise, she disdains to touch the earth. She is not to be courted, but worshiped. She is not composed of flesh and blood, but of roses and lilies and snow. In short, she is altogether overwhelmed and mystified with the multitude of her own perfections. The adorer is Damon or Strephon; a shepherd, or a pilgrim, or a knight errant; and his passion is a dart, a flame, a wound, a Cupid, a religion,—anything but itself.

  We are afraid that the weary iteration of these extravagant commonplace conundrums arises from a source very different from passionate admiration. Authors are but too apt to have a mean opinion of the female intellect. Ladies’ men of the school of Will Honeycomb rarely appreciate women as they should do, and recluse students, conscious of their own deficiency in the graces which are supposed indispensable to gain the favor of the fair, endeavor to despise the sex which overawes them. Another source of this silly sameness of love verses is the notion that a lover must compose as well as dress in the height of the fashion. Hence the endless repetition of stock phrases and similes; the impertinent witticism; the willful exclusion of plain sense and plain English; the scented, powdered, fringed, and furbelowed coxcombry of quality love poets.

  The drawing-room style is, however, well nigh obsolete. We hear little of the Damons and Strephons, with their Phillis and Amaryllis, for all the world like the porcelain shepherds and shepherdesses that used to adorn our mantelpieces before geology and mineralogy became fashionable for ladies. Diana and Minerva, and Hebe and Aurora, and the rest of those folks, are left to slumber peacefully in Tooke’s Pantheon, though a certain class of poets have bestowed the names of those divinities on a whimsical set of beings of their own invention.

  We should not, however, censure the introduction of the Grecian deities in Greek and Roman poetry. Not only were they objects of popular belief, but distinct and glorious forms, familiar as household things to every eye and memory. Sculpture and painting had given them a real being; their names immediately suggested a fair or sublime image,—a delightful recollection of the wonders of art sanctified by something of a religious feeling that inspired them with immortal life, and invested them with imaginary beauty. Even the classic allusions of our own early writers may be defended, but on different ground. Mythologic names were not then unavoidably associated with schoolboys’ tasks and court or cockney poetry. They were flowers fresh from the gardens of Italy and Greece, perfumed with recollection of the olden time. They did not, indeed, suggest distinct images to ordinary readers; but, what perhaps was better, they gave a momentum to the imagination in a certain direction; they excited an indefinite expansion—a yearning after the ideal,—a longing for beauty beyond what is seen by the eye or circumscribed by form and color, a passionate uncertainty.