eBooks Base 2000

In the first place, our non-lover may assure us, the nature of love is
such that it involves contempt for the life of a bard. For love is a mad
pursuit of life at first hand, in its most engrossing aspect, and it
renders one deaf and blind to all but the object of the chase; while
poetry is, as Plato points out, [Footnote: See the _Republic_ X, sec.
599-601; and _Phaedrus_, sec. 248.] only a pale and lifeless imitation
of the ardors and delights which the lover enjoys at first hand.
Moreover, one who attempts to divide his attention between the muse and
an earthly mistress, is likely not only to lose the favor of the former,
but, as the ubiquity of the rejected poet in verse indicates, to lose
the latter as well, because his temperament will incline him to go into
retirement and meditate upon his lady's charms, when he should be
flaunting his own in her presence. It will not be long, indeed, before
he has so covered the object of his affection with the leafage of his
fancy, that she ceases to have an actual existence for him at all.


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