love
will point to his popularity in the 1890's, when the artificial and
heartless artist enjoyed his greatest vogue. As his most scintillating
advocate he will choose Oscar Wilde. Assuring us of many prose passages
in his favor, he will read to us the expression of conflict between love
and art in _Flower of Love_, where Wilde exclaims,

I have made my choice, have lived my poems, and though my youth is
gone in wasted days,
I have found the lover's crown of myrtle better than the poet's
crown of bays,

and he will read the record of the same sense of conflict, in different
mood, expressed in the sonnet _Helas_:

To drift with every passion till my soul
Is a stringed lute on which all winds can play,
Is it for this that I have given away
Mine ancient wisdom and austere control?
Methinks my life is a twice-written scroll
Scrawled over on some boyish holiday
With idle songs for pipe and virelai,
Which do but mar the secret of the whole.
Surely there was a time I might have trod
The sunlit heights, and from life's dissonance
Struck one clear chord to reach the ears of God.
Is that time dead? Lo, with a little rod
I did but touch the honey of romance,
And must I lose a soul's inheritance?

And yet, when the non-lover has finally arrived at the peroration of his
defense, we may remain unshaken in our conviction that from the _Song
of Solomon_ to the _Love Songs of Sara Teasdale_, the history of poetry
constitutes an almost unbroken hymn to the power of love, "the poet, and
the source of poetry in others," [Footnote: _The Symposium_ of Plato, Sec.
196.] as Agathon characterized him at the banquet in Love's honour.
Within the field of our especial inquiry, the last century, we may rest
assured that there is no true poet whose work, rightly interpreted, is
out of tune with this general acclaim. Even Browning and Oscar Wilde are
to be saved, although, it may be, only as by fire.

The influence of love upon poetry, which we are assuming with such _a
priori_ certainty, is effected in various ways. The most obvious, of
course, is by affording new subject matter. The confidence of
Shakespeare,

How can my muse want subject to invent
While thou dost breathe, that pourest into my verse
Thine own sweet argument?

is at least as characteristic of the nineteenth as of the sixteenth
century. The depletion of our lyric poetry, if everything relating to