Talk not of Love, it gives me pain,
For Love has been my foe;
He bound me in an iron chain,
And plunged me deep in woe.

The last two lines deserve praise—­even the praise they obtained from a great lyric poet.  But how is the song to be continued?  Genius might answer the question; to Clarinda there came only the notion of a valuable contrast to be established between love and friendship, and a tribute to be paid to the kindly offices of the latter.  The verses wherein she gave effect to this idea make a poor sequel; friendship, when it is personified and set beside the tyrant god, wears very much the air of a benevolent county magistrate, whose chief duty is to keep the peace.

Figures of this sort are in no sense removable decorations, they are at one with the substance of the thought to be expressed, and are entitled to the large control they claim.  Imagination, working at white heat, can fairly subdue the matter of the poem to them, or fuse them with others of the like temper, striking unity out of the composite mass.  One thing only is forbidden, to treat these substantial and living metaphors as if they were elegant curiosities, ornamental excrescences, to be passed over abruptly on the way to more exacting topics.  The mystics, and the mystical poets, knew better than to countenance this frivolity.  Recognising that there is a profound and intimate correspondence between all physical manifestations and the life of the soul, they flung the reins on the neck of metaphor in the hope that it might carry them over that mysterious frontier.  Their failures and misadventures, familiarly despised as “conceits,” left them floundering in absurdity.  Yet not since the time of Donne and Crashaw has the full power and significance of figurative language been realised in English poetry.  These poets, like some of their late descendants, were tortured by a sense of hidden meaning, and were often content with analogies that admit of no rigorous explanation.  They were convinced that all intellectual truth is a parable, though its inner meaning be dark or dubious.  The philosophy of friendship deals with those mathematical and physical conceptions of distance, likeness, and attraction—­what if the law of bodies govern souls also, and the geometer’s compasses measure more than it has entered into his heart to conceive?  Is the moon a name only for a certain tonnage of dead matter, and is the law of passion parochial while the law of gravitation is universal?  Mysticism will observe no such partial boundaries.

O more than Moon! 
Draw not up seas to drown me in thy sphere,
Weep me not dead in thine arms, but forbear
To teach the sea what it may do too soon.

The secret of these sublime intuitions, undivined by many of the greatest poets, has been left to the keeping of transcendental religion and the Catholic Church.