Tennyson has charmingly represented a lover wishing that he were a necklace of his beloved, or her girdle, or her earring; but that is not a cosmic emotion at all.  Indeed, the idea of Tennyson’s pretty song was taken from old French and English love songs of the peasants—­popular ballads.  But in this beautiful sonnet of Keats, where the lover wishes to be endowed with the immortality and likeness of a star only to be forever with the beloved, there is something of the old Greek thought which inspired the beautiful lines written between two and three thousand years ago, and translated by J.A.  Symonds: 

  Gazing on stars, my Star?  Would that I were the welkin,
  Starry with myriad eyes, ever to gave upon thee!

But there is more than the Greek beauty of thought in Keats’s sonnet, for we find the poet speaking of the exterior universe in the largest relation, thinking of the stars watching forever the rising and the falling of the sea tides, thinking of the sea tides themselves as continually purifying the world, even as a priest purifies a temple.  The fancy of the boy expands to the fancy of philosophy; it is a blending of poetry, philosophy, and sincere emotion.

You will have seen by the examples which we have been reading together that English love poetry, like Japanese love poetry, may be divided into many branches and classified according to the range of subject from the very simplest utterance of feeling up to that highest class expressing cosmic emotion.  Very rich the subject is; the student is only puzzled where to choose.  I should again suggest to you to observe the value of the theme of illusion, especially as illustrated in our examples.  There are indeed multitudes of Western love poems that would probably appear to you very strange, perhaps very foolish.  But you will certainly acknowledge that there are some varieties of English love poetry which are neither strange nor foolish, and which are well worth studying, not only in themselves but in their relation to the higher forms of emotional expression in all literature.  Out of love poetry belonging to the highest class, much can be drawn that would serve to enrich and to give a new colour to your own literature of emotion.

CHAPTER III

THE IDEAL WOMAN IN ENGLISH POETRY

As I gave already in this class a lecture on the subject of love poetry, you will easily understand that the subject of the present lecture is not exactly love.  It is rather about love’s imagining of perfect character and perfect beauty.  The part of it to which I think your attention could be deservedly given is that relating to the imagined wife of the future, for this is a subject little treated of in Eastern poetry.  It is a very pretty subject.  But in Japan and other countries of the East almost every young man knows beforehand whom he is likely to marry.  Marriage is arranged by the family: