If fate and nature screen from me
    The sovran front I bowed before,
  And set the glorious creature free,
    Whom I would clasp, detain, adore,—­
  If I forego that strange delight,
  Must all be lost?  Not quite, not quite.

  Die, Little Love, without complaint,
    Whom honour standeth by to shrive: 
  Assoiled from all selfish taint,
    Die, Love, whom Friendship will survive. 
  Not hate nor folly gave thee birth;
  And briefness does but raise thy worth.

This is the same thought which Tennyson expressed in his famous lines,

  ’Tis better to have loved and lost
  Than never to have loved at all.

But it is still more finely expressed to meet a particular personal mood.  One must not think the world lost because a woman has been lost, he says, and such a love is not a thing for any man to be ashamed of, in spite of the fact that it has been disappointed.  It was honourable, unselfish, not inspired by any passion or any folly, and the very brevity of the experience only serves to make it more precious.  Observe the use of the words “shrive” and “assoiled.”  These refer to the old religious custom of confession; to “shrive” signifies to forgive, to free from sin, as a priest is supposed to do, and “assoiled” means “purified.”

If this was a personal experience, it must have been an experience of advanced life.  Elsewhere the story of a boyish love is told very prettily, under the title of “Two Fragments of Childhood.”  This is the first fragment: 

  When these locks were yellow as gold,
  When past days were easily told,
  Well I knew the voice of the sea,
  Once he spake as a friend to me. 
  Thunder-rollings carelessly heard,
  Once that poor little heart they stirred,
    Why, Oh, why? 
    Memory, memory! 
  She that I wished to be with was by.

  Sick was I in those misanthrope days
  Of soft caresses, womanly ways;
  Once that maid on the stair I met
  Lip on brow she suddenly set. 
  Then flushed up my chivalrous blood,
  Like Swiss streams in a mid-summer flood. 
    Then, Oh, then,
    Imogen, Imogen! 
  Hadst thou a lover, whose years were ten.

This is evidently the charming memory of a little sick boy sent to the seaside for his health, according to the English custom, and unhappy there, unable to play about like stronger children, and obliged to remain under the constant care of nurses and female relatives.  But in the same house there is another family with a beautiful young daughter, probably sixteen or eighteen years old.  The little boy wishes, wishes so much that the beautiful lady would speak to him and play with him, but he is shy, afraid to approach her—­only looks at her with great admiring loving eyes.  But one day she meets him on the stairs, and stoops down and kisses him on the forehead.  Then he is in Heaven.  Afterward no doubt she played with