Whoever heard of Homer making sonnets to an eye-brow?
Or Aristotle singing to a maiden with his lute?
Imagine wise old Plato, with his pale and massive high-brow.
Wrinkling it by thinking how his love he’d prosecute;
Do you think Professor Agassiz learned all he knew by sighing?
Or that Mr. Herbert Spencer thought out ethics at a ball?
If our own lamented Emerson of love had been a-dying,
We never should have heard of his philosophy at all.
Can love teach youthful maidens anything at all of Botany?
Or Mathematics cause a thrill erotic in the heart?