_BY PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY_.
What is Love? Ask him who lives what is life; ask him who adores what
is God.
I know not the internal constitution of other men, nor even of thine
whom I now address. I see that in some external attributes they
resemble me, but when, misled by that appearance, I have thought to
appeal to something in common, and unburden my inmost soul to them, I
have found my language misunderstood, like one in a distant and savage
land. The more opportunities they have afforded me for experience, the
wider has appeared the interval between us, and to a greater distance
have the points of sympathy been withdrawn. With a spirit ill-fitted
to sustain such proof, trembling and feeble through its tenderness,
I have every where sought, and have found only repulse and
disappointment.
_Thou_ demandest what is Love. It is that powerful attraction towards
all we conceive, or fear, or hope, beyond ourselves, when we find
within our own thoughts the chasm of an insufficient void, and seek
to awaken in all things that are, a community with what we experience
within ourselves. If we reason we would be understood; if we imagine,
we would that the airy children of our brain were born anew within
another's; if we feel, we would that another's nerves should vibrate
to our own, that the beams of their eyes should kindle at once, and
mix and melt into our own; that lips of motionless ice should not
reply to lips quivering and burning with the heart's best blood:--this
is Love. This is the bond and the sanction which connects not only
man with man, but with every thing which exists. We are born into the
world, and there is something within us, which, from the instant that
we live, more and more thirsts after its likeness. It is probably
in correspondence with this law that the infant drains milk from
the bosom of its mother; this propensity develops itself with the
development of our nature. We dimly see within our intellectual
nature, a miniature as it were of our entire self, yet deprived of
all that we condemn or despise, the ideal prototype of every thing
excellent and lovely that we are capable of conceiving as belonging
to the nature of man. Not only the portrait of our external being,
but an assemblage of the minutest particles of which our nature is
composed: a mirror whose surface reflects only the forms of purity and
brightness: a soul within our own soul that describes a circle around
its proper Paradise, which pain and sorrow and evil dare not overleap.
To this we eagerly refer all sensations, thirsting that they should
resemble and correspond with it. The discovery of its antitype; the
meeting with an understanding capable of clearly estimating our own;
an imagination which should enter into and seize upon the subtle
and delicate peculiarities which we have delighted to cherish and
unfold in secret, with a frame, whose nerves, like the chords of two
exquisite lyres, strung to the accompaniment of one delightful voice,
vibrate with the vibrations of our own; and a combination of all these
in such proportion as the type within demands: this is the invisible
and unattainable point to which Love tends; and to attain which, it
urges forth the powers of man to arrest the faintest shadow of that,
without the possession of which, there is no rest or respite to the
heart over which it rules. Hence in solitude, or that deserted state
when we are surrounded by human beings, and yet they sympathize not
with us; we love the flowers, the grass, the waters, and the sky. In
the motion of the very leaves of Spring, in the blue air, there is
then found a secret correspondence with our heart. There is eloquence
in the tongueless wind, and a melody in the flowing brooks and the
rustling of the reeds beside them, which, by their inconceivable
relation to something within the soul, awaken the spirits to dances of
breathless rapture, and bring tears of mysterious tenderness to the
eyes, like the enthusiasm of patriotic success, or the voice of one
beloved singing to you alone. Sterne says that if he were in a desert
he would love some cypress. So soon as this want or power is dead, man
becomes a living sepulchre of himself, and what yet survives is the
mere husk of what once he was.
* * * * *
This and a fragment, with a character of Mr. Canning, by Sir James
Mackintosh, are the _transcendentals_ of the volume; as are the
tale--The Half-brothers, by Mr. Banim, with an Ossian-like plate of
the heroine; The Sisters of Albano, by Mrs. Shelley--Death of the
Laird's Jock, by the author of Waverley--and Ferdinando Eboli, by Mrs.
Shelley, with Adelinda, a plate, by Heath, on which we could feast our
eyes for a full hour. Next, a sketch, by Theodore Hook, part of which
will serve to vary our sheet:--