He sometimes described, with a curious fastidiousness, the qualities which a female must possess to kindle the fire of love in his bosom. The imaginative youth supposed that he was to be moved by the most absolute perfection alone. It is equally impossible to doubt the exquisite refinement of his taste, or the boundless power of the most mighty of divinities; to refuse to believe that he was a just and skilful critic of feminine beauty and grace, and of whatever is attractive, or that he was never practically as blind, at the least, as men of ordinary talent. How sadly should we disparage the triumphs of Love were we to maintain that he is able to lead astray the senses of the vulgar alone!
In the theory of love, however, a poet will rarely err. Shelley’s lively fancy had painted a goodly portraiture of the mistress of the fair garden, nor were apt words wanting to convey to me a faithful copy of the bright original. It would be a cruel injustice to an orator should a plain man attempt, after a silence of more than twenty years, to revive his glowing harangue from faded recollections. I will not seek, therefore, to pourtray the likeness of the ideal nymph of the flower-garden.
“Since your fairy gardener,” I said, “has so completely taken possession of your imagination,” and he was wonderfully excited by the unexpected scene and his own splendid decorations, “it is a pity we did not notice the situation, for I am quite sure I should not be able to return thither, to recover your Eden and the Eve, whom you created to till it, and I doubt whether you could guide me.”
He acknowledged that he was as incapable of finding it again as of leading me to that paradise to which I had compared it.
“You may laugh at my enthusiasm,” he continued, “but you must allow that you were not less struck by the singularity of that mysterious corner of the earth than myself. You are equally entitled, therefore, to dwell there, at least, in fancy, and to find a partner whose character will harmonise with the genius of the place.”
He then declared, that thenceforth it should be deemed the possession of two tutelary nymphs, not of one; and he proceeded with unabated fervour to delineate the second patroness, and to distinguish her from the first.
“No!” he exclaimed, pausing in the rapid career of words, and for a while he was somewhat troubled, “the seclusion is too sweet, too holy, to be the theatre of ordinary love; the love of the sexes, however pure, still retains some taint of earthly grossness; we must not admit it within the sanctuary.”
He was silent for several minutes, and his anxiety visibly increased.
“The love of a mother for a child is more refined; it is more disinterested, more spiritual; but,” he added, after some reflection, “the very existence of the child still connects it with the passion which we have discarded,” and he relapsed into his former musings.
“The love a sister bears towards a sister,” he exclaimed abruptly, and with an air of triumph, “is unexceptionable.”