ENGLISH TESTIMONY

English literature, particularly, has been saturated with this sentiment for several centuries.  Love is “all purity,” according to Shakspere’s Silvius.  Schlegel remarked that by the manner in which Shakspere handled the story of Romeo and Juliet, it has become

“a glorious song of praise on that inexpressible feeling which ennobles the soul and gives to it its highest sublimity, and which elevates even the senses themselves into soul;”

—­which reminds one of Emerson’s expression that the body is “ensouled” through love.  Steele declared that “Love is a passion of the mind (perhaps the noblest), which was planted in it by the same hand that created it;” and of Lady Elizabeth Hastings he wrote that “to love her was a liberal education.”  In Steel’s Lover (No. 5) we read: 

“During this emotion I am highly elated in my Being, and my every sentiment improved by the effects of that Passion....  I am more and more convinced that this Passion is in lowest minds the strongest Incentive that can move the Soul of Man to laudable Accomplishments.”

And in No. 29:  “Nothing can mend the Heart better than an honorable Love, except Religion.”  Thomas Otway sang: 

     O woman! lovely woman!  Nature made thee
     To temper man:  we had been brutes without you. 
     There’s in you all that we believe of heaven,
     Amazing brightness, purity, and truth,
     Eternal joy, and everlasting love.

“Love taught him shame,” said Dryden, and Spenser wrote a Hymn in Honor of Love, in which he declared that

     Such is the power of that sweet passion
       That it all sordid baseness doth expel,
     And the refined mind doth newly fashion
       Unto a fairer form, which now doth dwell
     In his high thought, that would itself excel.

Leigh Hunt wrote:  “My love has made me better and more desirous of improvement than I have been.”

Love, indeed, is light from heaven;
A spark of that immortal fire,
With angels shared, by Allah given,
To lift from earth our low desire. 
Devotion wafts the mind above,
But heaven itself descends in love.
—­Byron.

Why should we kill the best of passions, love? 
It aids the hero, bids ambition rise
To nobler heights, inspires immortal deeds,
Ev’n softens brutes, and adds a grace to virtue.

          
                                                                                      —­Thomson.

Dr. Beddoe, author of the Browning Cyclopaedia, declares that “the passion of love, throughout Mr. Browning’s works, is treated as the most sacred thing in the human soul.”  How Browning himself loved we know from one of his wife’s letters, in which she relates how she tried to discourage his advances: