f Browning
and Browning's wife. A love whose blindness, exaggeration of passion,
all that might have made it foolish and impracticable, leads no longer
to folly and sin, but to an intenser activity of mankind's imagination
of the good and beautiful, to a momentary realization in our fancy of
all our vague dreams of perfection; a love which, though it may cool
down imperceptibly and pale in its intenseness, like the sunrise fires
into a serene sky, has left some glory round the head of the wife, some
glory in the heart of the husband, has been, however fleeting, a vision
of beauty which has made beauty more real. And all this owing to the
creation, the storing up, the purification by the Platonic poets of
Tuscany, of that strange and seemingly so artificial and unreal thing,
mediaeval love; the very forms and themes of whose poetry, the _serena_
and the _alba_, which had been indignantly put aside by the early
Italian lyrists, being unconsciously revived, and purified and
consecrated in the two loveliest love poems of Elizabethan poetry: the
_serena_, the evening song of impatient expectation in Spenser's
Epithalamium; the _alba_, the dawn song of hurried parting, in the
balcony scene of "Romeo and Juliet."

Let us recapitulate. The feudal Middle Ages gave to mankind a more
refined and spiritual love, a love all chivalry, fidelity, and
adoration, but a love steeped in the poison of adultery; and to save the
pure and noble portions of this mediaeval love became the mission of the
Tuscan poets of that strange school of Platonic love which in its very
loveliness may sometimes seem so unnatural and sterile. For, by reducing
this mediaeval love to a mere intellectual passion, seeking in woman
merely a self-made embodiment of cravings after perfection, they
cleansed away that deep stain of adultery; they quadrupled the intensity
of the ideal element; they distilled the very essential spirit of poetic
passion, of which but a few drops, even as diluted by Petrarch,
precipitated, when mingled with the earthly passion of future poets, to
the bottom, no longer to be seen or tasted, all baser ingredients.

And, while the poems of minnesingers and troubadours have ceased to
appeal to us, and remain merely for their charm of verse and of graceful
conceit; the poetry written by the Italians of the thirteenth century
for women, whose love was but an imaginative fervour, remains
concentrated in the "Vita Nuova;" and will remain for all