rld than it has been generally
deemed. Naturally, the advocate for what has been tried, and averse
to what is speculative, it opposes the new philosophy that appeals to
reason, and clings to the old which is propped by sanction.

LOVE, AND WRITERS ON LOVE.

My warm, hot-headed, ardent young friends, ye are in the flower of your
life, and writing verses about love,--let us say a word on the
subject. There are two species of love common to all men and to most
animals,--[Most animals; for some appear insensible to the love of
custom]--one springs from the senses, the other grows out of custom.
Now, neither of these, my dear young friends, is the love that you
pretend to feel,--the love of lovers. Your passion, having only its
foundation (and that unacknowledged) in the senses, owes everything else
to the imagination. Now, the imagination of the majority is different
in complexion and degree in every country and in every age; so also, and
consequently, is the love of the imagination. As a proof, observe that
you sympathize with the romantic love of other times or nations only
in proportion as you sympathize with their poetry and imaginative
literature. The love which stalks through the "Arcadia" or "Amadis
of Gaul" is to the great bulk of readers coldly insipid or solemnly
ridiculous. Alas! when those works excited enthusiasm, so did the love
which they describe. The long speeches, the icy compliments, expressed
the feeling of the day. The love madrigals of the time of Shenstone,
or the brocade gallantries of the French poets in the last century, any
woman now would consider hollow or childish, imbecile or artificial.
Once the songs were natural, and the love seductive. And now, my young
friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the
love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous
through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and
so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies,
and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star,--all that love
too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young
aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which
ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where
Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before,--go with the
Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric
"mo