As he discovers, with ever fresh wonder, the
power of love as muse, each new poet, in turn, is wont to pour his
gratitude for his inspiration into song, undeterred by the fact that
love has received many encomiums before.
It is not strange that this hymn should be broken by rude taunts on the
part of the uninitiated.
Saynt Idiote, Lord of these foles alle,
Chaucer's Troilus called Love, long ago, and the general public has been
no less free with this characterization in the last century than in the
fourteenth. Nor is it merely that part of the public which associates
all verse with sentimentality, and flees from it as from a contagion,
which thus sneers at the praise lovers give to their divinity. On the
contrary, certain young aspirants to the poet's laurel, feeling that the
singer's indebtedness to love is an overworked theme, have tried, like
the non-lover of the _Phaedrus_, to charm the literary public by
the novelty of a different profession. As the non-lover of classic
Greece was so fluent in his periods that Socrates and Phaedrus narrowly
escaped from being overwhelmed by his much speaking, so the non-lover of
the present time says much for himself.
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