This is a very fine instance of the purely idea emotion—­extravagant, if you like, in the force of the imagery used, but absolutely sincere and true; for the imagination of love is necessarily extravagant.  It would be quite useless to ask whether the sound of a girl’s footsteps could really waken a dead man; we know that love can fancy such things quite naturally, not in one country only but everywhere.  An Arabian poem written long before the time of Mohammed contains exactly the same thought in simpler words; and I think that there are some old Japanese songs containing something similar.  All that the statement really means is that the voice, the look, the touch, even the footstep of the woman beloved have come to possess for the lover a significance as great as life and death.  For the moment he knows no other divinity; she is his god, in the sense that her power over him has become infinite and irresistible.

The second example may be furnished from another part of the same composition—­the little song of exaltation after the promise to marry has been given.

  O let the solid ground
    Not fail beneath my feet
  Before my life has found
    What some have found so sweet;
  Then let come what come may,
  What matter if I go mad,
  I shall have had my day.

  Let the sweet heavens endure,
    Not close and darken above me
  Before I am quite, quite sure
    That there is one to love me;
  Then let come what come may
  To a life that has been so sad,
  I shall have had my day.

The feeling of the lover is that no matter what happens afterwards, the winning of the woman is enough to pay for life, death, pain, or anything else.  One of the most remarkable phenomena of the illusion is the supreme indifference to consequences—­at least to any consequences which would not signify moral shame or loss of honour, Of course the poet is supposed to consider the emotion only in generous natures.  But the subject of this splendid indifference has been more wonderfully treated by Victor Hugo than by Tennyson—­as we shall see later on, when considering another phase of the emotion.  Before doing that, I want to call your attention to a very charming treatment of love’s romance by an American.  It is one of the most delicate of modern compositions, and it is likely to become a classic, as it has already been printed in four or five different anthologies.  The title is “Atalanta’s Race.”

First let me tell you the story of Atalanta, so that you will be better able to see the fine symbolism of the poem.  Atalanta, the daughter of a Greek king, was not only the most beautiful of maidens, but the swiftest runner in the world.  She passed her time in hunting, and did not wish to marry.  But as many men wanted to marry her, a law was passed that any one who desired to win her must run a race with her.  If he could beat her in running, then she promised to marry him, but if he lost the race,