The woman is dead.  In the room where her body died, flowers have been placed, offerings to the dead.  Also there are flowers upon the bed.  The ghost of the woman observes all this, but she does not feel either glad or sad because of it; she is thinking only of the living lover, who was not there when she died, but far away.  She wants to know whether he really loved her, whether he will really be sorry to hear that she is dead.  Outside the room of death the birds are singing; in the fields beyond the windows peasants are working, and talking as they work.  But the ghost does not listen to these sounds.  The ghost remains in the room only for love’s sake; she can not go away until the lover comes.  At last she hears him coming.  She knows the sound of the step; she knows the touch of the hand upon the lock of the door.  And instantly, before she sees him at all, she first feels delight.  Already it seems to her that she can smell the perfume of the flowers of heaven; it then seems to her that about her head, as about the head of an angel, a circle of glory is shaping itself, and the real heaven, the Heaven of Love, is at hand.

How very beautiful this is.  There is still one line which requires a separate explanation—­I mean the sentence about the sands of time running golden.  Perhaps you may remember the same simile in Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall”: 

  Love took up the glass of Time, and turn’d it in His glowing hands;
  Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands.

Here time is identified with the sand of the hour glass, and the verb “to run” is used because this verb commonly expresses the trickling of the sand from the upper part of the glass into the lower.  In other words, fine sand “runs” just like water.  To say that the sands of time run golden, or become changed into gold, is only a poetical way of stating that the time becomes more than happy—­almost heavenly or divine.  And now you will see how very beautiful the comparison becomes in this little poem about the ghost of the woman waiting for the coming step of her lover.

Several other aspects of the emotion may now be considered separately.  One of these, an especially beautiful one, is memory.  Of course, there are many aspects of love’s memories, some all happiness, others intensely sorrowful—­the memory of a walk, a meeting, a moment of good-bye.  Such memories occupy a very large place in the treasure house of English love poems.  I am going to give three examples only, but each of a different kind.  The first poet that I am going to mention is Coventry Patmore.  He wrote two curious books of poetry, respectively called “The Angel in the House” and “The Unknown Eros.”  In the first of these books he wrote the whole history of his courtship and marriage—­a very dangerous thing for a poet to do, but he did it successfully.  The second volume is miscellaneous, and contains some very beautiful things.  I am going to quote only a few lines from the piece called “Amelia.”  This piece is the story of an evening spent with a sweetheart, and the lines which I am quoting refer to the moment of taking the girl home.  They are now rather famous: