And then follows Coleridge's own account of love, of which it can only be said, that, if he had written it when he was younger, it would probably have been as perfect in form and expression as it is inclusive in what we might call the categories of love:— - "Coleridge. But, above all, it supposes a soul which, even in the pride and summer-tide of life, even in the lustihood of health and strength, had felt oftenest and prized highest that which age cannot take away, and which, in all our lovings, is the love. "Eliza. There is something here (pointing to her heart) that seems to understand you, but it wants the word that would make it understand itself. "Katherine. I too seem to feel what you mean. In terpret the feeling for us. "Coleridge. I mean that willing sense of the unsufficingness of the self for itself which predisposes a generous nature to see, in the total being of another, the sup plement and completion of its own, that quiet, perpetual seeking which the presence of the beloved object modulates, not suspends, where the heart momently finds, and, finding, again seeks on; - lastly, when 'life's changeful orb has passed the full,' a confirmed faith in the nobleness of humanity, thus brought home and pressed, as it were, to the very bosom of hourly experi When you have read this, you feel that it is correct, and even affecting. But yet "What wants that knave That a king should have?" something is wanted, and in that something everything! The recent discussions about the Talmud have disclosed a depth of benightedness in society, even among men whom you might expect to know better, that is extremely irritating, if not surprising. Surprising, indeed, it is not; for it is only the old difference between seeing and not seeing which everlastingly divides men and women. All the talent is nothing, and all the culture is nothing; do you see? is the question. To descend to a trivial illustration. A reviewer, not very long ago, attacked a preface written by Dr. Johnson, upon the hypothesis that it was written by Dr. Latham. It was said, and it might well have been true, that the reviewer was a learned and accomplished man. Nothing more likely; yet a child of seven, with the sensibility which he lacked, would not have fallen into his error, or any error of a similar kind. To take another illustration. There are millions of people, including men of great learning and piety, who seem absolutely blind to the difference between the Christ of the Latin imagination and the childlike Christ of the Teutonic imagination. But to return to Love and the Talmud. Every one will remember the exultation (surprising to those who are familiar with their Apocrypha as well as with their Bible) with which certain Talmudic deliverances about women were received when the article of M. Deutsch appeared in the Quarterly Review. "What becomes now of the Teutonic origin of the household virtues?" asked an able pen in the Pall Mall Gazette. Whoever has said that the household virtues were of Teutonic origin has talked nonsense. But the question as to Love, between the Western spirit and the Oriental or Semitic spirit, has nothing to do, one way or the other, with the household virtues. Let us try and see what really it is. Many of our readers probably know Miss Dora Greenwell as the author of some tender poetry and some thoughtful prose. She is a perfectly orthodox writer, as anybody who has read her " Two Friends" must be aware. She has also written a set of poems of the sonnet type, entitled "Liber Veritatis." There is a series of tenderly passionate love poems, not on a level with Mrs. Browning's Portuguese sonnets either in the passion or the poetry, but quite real and true. Their author must know something of what love really is. Now, in the little book called "Two Friends"-which, as we have stated, is strictly orthodox-Dora Greenwell boldly says that love is not to be found at all in the New Testament. "The silence of the New Testament is a wonderful thing." Not at all wonderful say we, for love is utterly alien to the Oriental or Semitic spirit. The curious thing is that Miss Greenwell does not go on to remark that love is also wholly wanting in the New Testament. And the reason is the same. Love considered as a passion, or the desire to possess something beautiful; love as household friendship, with special regard shown to the weaker by the stronger; and love, as mere appetite (appetite, we say, as distinguished from passion), you find in Semitic and Oriental writings; but there is no room in the Semitic or Oriental spirit (even though it were shown that chivalry itself came from the Arab) for love of the highest type known to the Western mind. In the first place, reading writers like Tieck and Fouque we become conscious of a peculiar and inscrutable, but deeply fascinating, purity of atmosphere-a purity which 18 so childlike that it permits free reference to topics which to the Latin or Celtic intelligence are inclosed in company with topics relating to the accidents of nutrition-a never-failing sign of the non-Teutonic spirit. There are love-passages in Tieck and in Fouque which could not be read aloud in a mixed circle in England; there are two sertences in Undine (the last of Chapter VII, and the second of Chapter VIII) which are omitted in some of the English translations. But can any thing be more childlike, pure, or more near to beaven? And yet it is utterly foreign to the Eastern or Semitic spirit. That spirit always finds the woman an inferior and unclean nature, She is subjected. She is the temptress. She has to be "purified." Among the Hebrews the mother of a girl had to undergo a quarantine of twice the length appointed to the mother of a boy (Levit. xii, 5, and Rev, xiv, 4). And, whatever modifications this way of looking at women undergoes it is never (we speak advisedly) wholly absent from Oriental or Semitic writings. The Teutonic way of thinking of a women is just the reverse, thus far. Nor does the difference end here. The characteristic points in the Teutonic or Scandinavian ideal, are two. First, the balance between the sexes is restored by the fact that the woman is held to be the power by which the spiritual impregnation of the man is effected; so that Jove is not only a liberal education, but, in the high sense, a conversion, and the creation of a moral or spiritual unity out of two, in a way which places the woman on a throne peculiarly hers. Secondly, the woman is never possessed, and never patronized. "What is thy petition, Queen Esther, and what is thy request? and it shall be done to thee, even to the half of my kingdom." That is the Eastern or Semitic pirit. Above all, absolute possession in the sense of mastery is essential to that spirit, and is never absent from it. But what a difference when we come to Scandinavian legends, even of the rudest times! When King Gunther has married Brunhilda, he 18 not 8 whit nearer. "Cette fiere beaute," as a Frenchman Judicrously calls her (missing the point like a true Celt), teaches King Gunther a lesson: "When I thought her love to gain, she bound me as her thrail, Unto a nail she bore me, and hung me on the wall," And it is only by magic that King Gunther finally conquers, and makes his bride yield up her girdle. These two points-the woman is never to be possessed "She's not and never can be mine," and that she is in herself (not as consecrated, but in herself) pure and divine, and the source of moral impregnation to the man, are of the essence of the Teutonic or true Western idea of love. By making a moral unit of two beings, this involves not only a monogamy, but (as an idea) perpetual monogamy. It involves, also, the highest type of self-sacrifice-the finest illustration of its action in this respect being to be found in the legend of Helmfrid, told in Fouque's "Thidolf the Icelander": "If yours you seek, not her delight, And it also involves heroism, of whatever kind, in the man: "You love? That's high as you shall go; Neither in this world nor the next." Mr. Tennyson has not shown the deepest possible sense of what love is, but here he is (as he would not fail to be) at one with the highest idea of it, for he makes King Arthur say: "I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven It is worth while, in these confused and fusing days, to recall the highest meanin the word "love;" nor is it unnecessar place it alongside of the make-shifts and counterfeits which pass for it in life or in tion. The novelists, as a rule, seem to lost all power of painting, or even hin what it is! Charlotte Bronte knew somet about it. So does Mr. Charles Kingsley. does George Eliot. So does Mrs. Oliph And there are others. But both in life and in fiction we usually presented to us for love, mere longing-a t which brings no sense of obligation in it and is therefore shoved aside for the most grading reasons. If love be all that nove and moralists in general make of it, the assuredly no reason whatever why the temptible things which are allowed to in fere with it should not do so. It is, in fact, worth making novels about; certainly worth making pems about. But it 8 ficiently plain that the human heart has ineradicable suspicion or presentment of so thing better than what it is so frequently off with. That something better-more th the strongest desire, more than the strong attachment, and more than the most perf household virtue-may be a flower that bloo only once in hundred years; but the time come to disbelieve that it ever d bloom? Or to pretend that you can pick it in the streets, or find it by merely looking it, or grow it like mustard and cress? Or deny that it is the flower which to have ga ered and wern is (not to put the case too hig as much as to have made a lot of money, or vented a new pill? 8 his mistress describe the upper, middle a There was once a footman who, having hes lower classes as china, delf and crockery, & being then told to bid the nursemaid bri down young master for a visitor to see, call out to her, "Hallo, Crockery, bring down lit Chaney!" The irony was not bad, but we d not allow crockery love to flout the love which is porcelain, much less the love which opal. All the loves are affiliated; but it is more true that, just because we are all hum Zeke Hickory bole's love was like the love Pericles, than it is true that the poor bee that we tread upon in corporal sufferance fe a pang as great as when a giant dies. U evening Zeke was found to have chalked his bed's head this simple rhyme: "My love, she is my heart's delight, But teach high thought, and amiable words 3 dn Supra que And-love of truth,and all that makes a mangnu jo sad molibu om ICE TE This is not quite satisfactory, and the word seip ano ano de UUI of fame," are least satisfactory of all. If there a we have omitted, "courtliness and the desir! pe me de su pa daqs is any thing to make a man careless of "fame' om te per te 10 it is surely love. It is the one thing which dis- a b closes, for once and forever, that which is real 10q ' t ad good, and confers the turquois that iq be to be a se anges color when a lie is in the atmosphere. Modbu qiza se te W, fame is the paltriest of cheats and the 01 a JO BA rst of lies. wyni ligat, Werati fered as shandy gaff and che |