nts of inspiration, ascribes
quite as powerful and as unidealistic an effect to the kisses of the
barmaids, as to the liquor they dispense. But this is mere bravado, as
much of his other verse shows. Byron's case, also, is a doubtful one.
The element of discontent is all that elevates his amours above the
"swinish trough," which Alfred Austin asserts them to be. [Footnote: In
_Off Mesolonghi_.] Yet, such as his idealism is, it constitutes the
strength and weakness of his poetical gift. Landor well says, [Footnote:
In _Lines To a Lady_.]

Although by fits so dense a cloud of smoke
Puffs from his sappy and ill-seasoned oak,
Yet, as the spirit of the dream draws near,
Remembered loves make Byron's self sincere.
The puny heart within him swells to view,
The man grows loftier and the poet too.

Ideal love is most likely to become articulate in the sonnet sequence.
The Platonic theory of love and beauty, ubiquitous in renaissance
sonnets, is less pretentiously but no less sincerely present in the
finest sonnets of the last century. The sense that the beauty of his
beloved is that of all other fair forms, the motive of Shakespeare's

Thy bosom is endeared with all hearts
Which I by lacking have supposed dead,

is likewise the motive of Rossetti's _Heart's Compass_,

Sometimes thou seemest not as thyself alone,
But as the meaning of all things that are;
A breathless wonder, shadowing forth afar
Some heavenly solstice, hushed and halcyon,
Whose unstirred lips are music's visible tone;
Whose eyes the sungates of the soul unbar,
Being of its furthest fires oracular,
The evident heart of all life sown and mown.

Thus also Mrs. Browning says of her earlier ideal loves,

Their shining fronts,
Their songs, their splendors (better, yet the same,
As river water hallowed into founts)
Met in thee.
[Footnote: _Sonnets of the Portuguese_, XXVI.]

Reflection of this sort almost inevitably leads the poet to the
conviction that his real love is eternal beauty. Such is the progress of
Rossetti's thought in _Heart's Hope_:

Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
Thy soul I know not from thy body nor
Thee from myself, neither our love from God.

The whole of Diotima's theory of the ascent to ideal beauty is here
implicit in three lines. In the same spirit Christina Rossetti
identifies her lover with her Christian faith:

Yea, as I apprehend it, love is such