The son, framed like Hamlet, to appreciate truth in all the beauty of relations, sinks into deep melancholy, when he finds his natural expectations disappointed. He has no mother. She to whom he gave the name, disgraces from his heart's shrine all the sex.
“Frailty, thy name is woman.”
It is because a Hamlet could find cause to say so, that I have put the line, whose stigma has never been removed, at the head of my work. But, as a lover, surely a Hamlet would not have so far mistook, as to have finished with such a conviction. He would have felt the faith of Othello, and that faith could not, in his more dispassionate mind, have been disturbed by calumny.
In Spain, this thought is arrayed in a sublimity, which belongs to the sombre and passionate genius of the nation. Calderon's Justina resists all the temptation of the Demon, and raises her lover, with her, above the sweet lures of mere temporal happiness. Their marriage is vowed at the stake; their souls are liberated together by the martyr flame into “a purer state of sensation and existence.”
In Italy, the great poets wove into their lives an
ideal love which answered to the highest wants. It
included those of the intellect and the affections, for
it was a love of spirit for spirit. It was not ascetic,
or superhuman, but, interpreting all things, gave their
proper beauty to details of the common life, the common
day; the poet spoke of his love, not as a flower
to place in his bosom, or hold carelessly in his hand,
but as a light towards which he must fiund wings to
