In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that
the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same class as
the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual
beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's
perturbation. He inquires:
Can proportion of the outward part
Move such affection in the inward mind
That it can rob both sense and reason blind?
Why do not then the blossoms of the field,
Which are arrayed with much more orient hue
And to the sense most daintie odors yield,
Work like impression in the looker's view?
[Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.]
Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic
mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in
asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the
senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all
creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they
declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love
poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other.
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