The British Friend Volume 7-8 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1898 Excerpt: ...are the most precious. Human love from its spiritual side has never been portrayed so clearly, and with such lovely candour, as in these letters of the two great poets to each other. Beginning with admiration for each other's poetry, growing through the personal communion of the cloistered woman-soul (cloistered by sorrow, by illness, and a father's tyrannical whim) with the great free open-air man-soul, into a changeless, and at last passionate and overpowering devotion, this love culminated in a marriage of such perfect and ideal happiness that even a poet's dream could reveal nothing higher or deeper. It is perhaps difficult for an ordinary mind, vegetating on the ordinary levels of existence, to realise what life became for these two. They were both poets--that is, both had the doors and windows of their natures set wide open to catch the subtlest impressions of spirit and sense, and were thus ready for all the joys such intense natures experience, so that to their eyes indeed "the daisies were like roses" and "each star a sphered moon." In two volumes, 21s. Smith, Elder & Co., 15, Waterloo Place, London. 1899. Then each, glowing with admiration, believed the other to be the poet, and not merely a poet. After their marriage their home was in Italy, that land of heart's desire to every artist, and their life of happy labour at their beloved craft was crowned with a love which seemed a tangible realisation of Dante's dream of Beatrice. It is small wonder, when we consider all this, that their poetry is drenched with "the love of love" and all high emprize; that the husband should have become the greatest poet-seer, the clearest ethical voice of his generation, and the wife the sweetest singer of hers in all causes of pity...