ich asserts Macbeth's
conclusion that life is "a tale told by an idiot," is saved from utter
chaos sufficiently to keep its poetical character, only because the
memory of his dead love gives Thomson a conception of eternal love and
beauty by which to gauge his hopeless despair.

In addition, our poets are wont to agree with their father Spenser that
the beauty of a beloved person is not to be placed in the same class as
the beauty of the world of nature. Spenser argues that the spiritual
beauty of a lady, rather than her outward appearance, causes her lover's
perturbation. He inquires:

Can proportion of the outward part
Move such affection in the inward mind
That it can rob both sense and reason blind?
Why do not then the blossoms of the field,
Which are arrayed with much more orient hue
And to the sense most daintie odors yield,
Work like impression in the looker's view?
[Footnote: _An Hymne in Honour of Beautie_.]

Modern theorists, who would no doubt despise the quaintly idealistic
mode of Spenser's expression, yet express much the same view in
asserting that romantic excitement is a stimulus which keys all the
senses to a higher pitch, thus dispersing one's amorousness over all
creation. The love celebrated in Brooke's _The Great Lover_, they
declare, cannot be compared with that of his more conventional love
poems, simply because the one love is the cause of the other. Such
heightened sensuous impressionability is celebrated in much of our most
beautiful love poetry of to-day, notably in Sara Teasdale's.

It may be that this intensity of perception engendered by love is its
most poetical effect. Much verse pictures the poet as a flamelike spirit
kindled by love to a preternaturally vivid apprehension of life for an
instant, before love dies away, leaving him ashes. Again and again the
analogy is pointed out between Shelley's spirit and the leaping flames
that consumed his body. Josephine Preston Peabody's interpretation of
Marlowe is of the same sort. In the drama of which Marlowe is the
title-character, his fellow-dramatist, Lodge, is much worried when he
learns of Marlowe's mad passion for a woman of the court.

Thou art a glorious madman,

Lodge exclaims,

Born to consume thyself anon in ashes,
And rise again to immortality.

Marlowe replies,

Oh, if she cease to smile, as thy looks say,
What if? I shall have drained my splendor down
To the last flaming drop! Then take m