The ideal of love and marriage rose high in the mind of all the Christian nations who were capable of grave and deep feeling. We may take as examples of its English aspect, the lines,
“I could not love thee, dear, so much,
Loved I not honor more.”
Or the address of the Commonwealth's man to his wife, as she looked out from the Tower window to see him for the last time, on his way to the scaffold. He stood up in the cart, waved his hat, and cried, “To Heaven, my love, to Heaven, and leave you in the storm?”
Such was the love of faith and honor, a love which stopped, like Colonel Hutchinson's, “on this side idolatry,” because it was religious. The meeting of two such souls Donne describes as giving birth to an “abler soul.”
Lord Herbert wrote to his love,
| “ | Were not our souls immortal made, |
| Our equal loves can make them such.” |
In the “Broken Heart” of Ford, Penthea, a character which engages my admiration even more deeply than the famous one of Calanthe, is made to present to the mind the most beautiful picture of what these relations should be in their purity. Her life cannot sustain the violation of what she so clearly felt.
Shakspeare, too, saw that, in true love as in fire, the utmost ardor is coincident with the utmost purity. It is a true lover that exclaims in the agony of Othello,
“If thou art false, O then Heaven mocks itself.”
