[Sidenote: THE HUMBLE COMPLAINT OF THE LOVER]
If love be the genial sun of human nature, unkindly has he divided his rays [in acting] on me and my beloved! On her hath he poured all his light and splendour, and my being doth he permeate with his invisible rays of heat alone. She shines and is cold like the tropic fire-fly--I, dark and uncomely, would better resemble the cricket in hot ashes. My soul, at least, might be considered as a cricket eradiating the heat which gradually cinerising the heart produces the embers and ashes from among which it chirps out of its hiding-place.
N.B.--This put in simple and elegant verse, [would pass] as an imitation of Marini, and of too large a part of the madrigals of Guarini himself.
Truth _per se_ is like unto quicksilver, bright, agile, harmless. Swallow a pound and it will run through unaltered and only, perhaps, by its weight force down impurities from out the system. But mix and comminute it by the mineral acid of spite and bigotry, and even truth becomes a deadly poison--medicinal only when some other, yet deadlier, lurks in the bones.
O! many, many are the seeings, hearings, of pure love that have a being of their own, and to call them by the names of things unsouled and debased below even their own lowest nature by associations accidental, and of vicious accidents, is _blasphemy_. What seest thou yonder? The lovely countenance of a lovely maiden, fervid yet awe-suffering with devotion--her face resigned to bliss or bale; or a _bit_ of _flesh_; or, rather, that which cannot be seen unless by him whose very seeing is more than an act of mere sight--that which refuses all words, because words being, perforce, generalities do not awake, but really involve associations of other words as well as other thoughts--but that which I see, must be felt, be possessed, in and by its sole self! What! shall the _statuary_ Pygmalion of necessity feel this for every part of the insensate marble, and shall the lover Pygmalion in contemplating the living statue, the heart-adored maiden, breathing forth in every look, every movement, the genial life imbreathed of God, grovel in the mire and grunt the language of the swinish slaves of the Circe, of vulgar generality and still more vulgar association? The Polyclete that created the Aphrodite [Greek: kallipygos], thought in acts, not words--energy divinely languageless--[Greek: dia ton Logon, ou syn epesi], through _the_ Word, not with _words_. And what though it met with Imp-fathers and Imp-mothers and Fiendsips at its christening in its parents' absence!