CHAPTER XIII.
POETS AND BEAUTIES,
FROM CHARLES II. TO QUEEN ANNE.
Thus, then, it appears, that love, even the most ethereal and poetical, does not always take flight "at sight of human ties;" and Pope wronged the real delicacy of Heloïse when he put this borrowed sentiment into her epistle, making that conduct the result of perverted principle, which, in her, was a sacrifice to extreme love and pride in its object. It is not the mere idea of bondage which frightens away the light-winged god;
The gentle bird feels no captivity
Within his cage, but sings and feeds his fill.[95]
It is when those bonds, which were first decreed in heaven
To keep two hearts together, which began
Their spring-time with one love,
are abused to vilest purposes:—to link together indissolubly, unworthiness with desert, truth with falsehood, brutality with gentleness; then indeed love is scared; his cage becomes a dungeon;—and either he breaks away, with plumage all impaired,—or folds up his many-coloured wings, and droops and dies.
But then it will be said, perhaps, that the splendour and the charm which poetry has thrown over some of these pictures of conjugal affection and wedded truth, are exterior and adventitious, or, at best, short-lived:—the bands were at first graceful and flowery;—but sorrow dewed them with tears, or selfish passions sullied them, or death tore them asunder, or trampled them down. It may be so; but still I will aver that what has been, is:—that there is a power in the human heart which survives sorrow, passion, age, death itself.