those very lips to press:”
a remark in the more morbid strain of Keats to Fanny Brawne.
When Lancelot first kisses Guinevere, he, the mighty knight, “well nigh swoons.” Love, with Gordon’s lovers, “consumes their hearts with a fiery drought.” “Laurence,” says Estelle to her lover,
“Laurence, you kiss me too hard:”
and the man of “Britomarte” is at hand with the appropriate criticism that
“men at the bottom are merely brutes.”
But we must not think that all Gordon’s lovers love in this way, any more than that all his men merely charge and cheer. The battle is over.
“And what then? The colours reversed, the drums muffled,
the black nodding plumes, the dead march and the pall,
the stern faces, soldier-like, silent, unruffled,