The poets, who have in all ages insisted on the analogies between genius
and insanity, have also long since discovered a general resemblance
between Love and Insanity. Indeed, the notion that Love is a sort of
madness is as old as Plato. Love, as understood by him—that is, man’s
“worship of youthful masculine beauty”—is, he says, mad, irrational,
superseding reason and prudence in the individual mind. And the Stoics,
who regarded all affections as maladies, looked upon the severest of the
passions as a grave mental disease.
Modern poetry is full of allusions to the fatuous folly of Love. Thus
Thomson—
“A lover is the very fool of nature.”