Many singers follow him in his belief that the only
worthy love is that for a being so superior that a return of love is
impossible. [Footnote: See _The Sphinx_--
Have I a lover who is noble and free?
I would he were nobler than to love me.
See also Walt Whitman, _Sometimes with One I Love_, and Mrs. Browning,
"I never thought that anyone whom I could love would stoop to love
me--the two things seemed clearly incompatible." Letter to Robert
Browning, December 24, 1845.]
To poets who do not subscribe to Emerson's belief in one-sided
attachments, Alexander Smith's _A Life Drama_ is a treasury of
suggestions as to devices by which the poet's lady may be kept at
sufficient distance to be useful. With the aid of intercalations Smith
exhibits the poet removed from his lady by scornful rejection, by
parental restraint, by an unhappy marriage, by self-reproach, and by
death. All these devices have been popular in our poetry.
The lady's marriage is seldom felt to be an insuperable barrier to love,
though it is effective in removing her to a suitable distance for
idealization.
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