The Loves of the Angels never attained to the popularity of Lalla Rookh, and yet it seems a much more praiseworthy composition. In the first place, Moore had chosen a subject that fell more within his range. Outside of light verse, his only themes were love and patriotism, and here we have the amatory poet indulging his genius to the full. The whole poem is about love-making—love-making in excelsis, and surrounded with accessories so decorative that they remove all hint of reality. One feels instinctively that the fierce accent of passion would be out of place here, and, consequently, does not censure the absence of it. His three fallen angels who meet and recall the loves for which they lost heaven, furnish three types of love-story, distinguished with all the care of a troubadour expert in la gaye science.
The first angel—one of a lower rank in heaven—is of look "the least celestial of the three," and, before the crisis in his story, has tasted
"That juice of earth, the bane
And blessing of man's heart and brain."
He is the one whom woman resisted—for Woman is throughout the poem all but deified; and his lady, to escape from the terrors of his love, as he comes to her after the wine-cup, steals the spell-word from him, and flies off to heaven, whither his wings can no longer follow. The second angel, a spirit of knowledge, is wooed by woman rather than her wooer, and at last is fated to destroy her with the death of Semele. Moore evidently thought that much knowledge was a dangerous thing for the sex. His ideal of womanhood is rather that depicted in the third story, of which the third angel is the subject, not the narrator. In this angel—
"That amorous spirit, bound
By beauty's spell, where'er 'twas found,"
who fell—
"From loving much,
Too easy lapse, to loving wrong,"
we may, I think, fairly trace some lineaments of Moore's conception of himself. For this seraph a gentler doom was decreed. He and his nymph are first drawn together by the snare of music, a snare even though in sacred song: for, as the poem tells—
"Love, though unto earth so prone,
Delights to take Religion's wing
When time or grief hath stained his own.
How near to Love's beguiling brink
Too oft entranced Religion lies!
While Music, Music is the link
They both still hold by to the skies."
The lovers meet at the altar, but they appeal to the altar to consecrate their vows. And thus the poem closes with a passage in celebration of connubial love, which, even though it perhaps seemed to Lady Donegal too bold a gloss on the text of Genesis, may very well have pleased the poet's Bessy; for we can be very certain that the poet was thinking more of Bessy than of Genesis when he wrote it. I shall quote the whole passage, which contains some lines that have hardly their equal in Moore's writings—notably the fine strain beginning, "For humble was their love,"—and, further on, the closing period which recalls, yet not by imitation, Wordsworth's scarcely more beautiful tribute to his wife:—