Love, why do we one passion call,
When 'tis a compound of them all?
The eminent Danish critic, George Brandes, though a special student of
English literature, overlooked these poets when he declared, in one of
his lectures on literary history (1872), that the book in which love
is for the first time looked on as something composite and an attempt
made to analyze it into its elements, is Benjamin Constant's _Adolphe_
(which appeared in 1816). "In _Adolphe_," he says,
"and in all the literature associated with that book, we are
informed accurately how many parts, how many grains, of
friendship, devotion, vanity, ambition, admiration, respect,
sensual attraction, illusion, fancy, deception, hate,
satiety, enthusiasm, reasoning calculation, etc., are
contained in the _mixtum compositum_ which the enamoured
persons call love."
This list, moreover, does not accurately name a single one of
the essential ingredients of true love, dwelling only on associated
phenomena, whereas Shakspere's lines call attention to three states of
mind which form part of the quintessence of romantic love--gallant
"service," "adoration," and "purity"--while "patience and impatience"
may perhaps be accepted as an equivalent of what I call the mixed
moods of hope and despair.