So sings the Poet of our day, in the loftiest of his poems--“In Memoriam”--addressing the spirit of his vanished friend. In the midst of his song arises the thought of _the Poet_ of all time, who loved his friend too, and would have lost him in a way far worse than death, had not his love been too strong even for that death, alone ghastly, which threatened to cut the golden chain that bound them, and part them by the gulf impassable. Tennyson’s friend had never wronged him; and to the divineness of Shakspere’s love is added that of forgiveness. Such love as this between man and man is rare, and therefore to the mind which is in itself no way rare, incredible, because unintelligible. But though all the commonest things are very divine, yet divine individuality is and will be a rare thing at any given period on the earth. Faith, in its ideal sense, will always be hard to find on the earth. But perhaps this kind of affection between man and man may, as Coleridge indicates in his “Table Talk,” have been more common in the reigns of Elizabeth and James than it is now. There is a certain dread of the demonstrative in the present day, which may, perhaps, be carried into regions where it is out of place, and hinder the development of a devotion which must be real, and grand, and divine, if one man such as Shakspere or Tennyson has ever felt it. If one has felt it, humanity may claim it. And surely He who is _the_ Son of man has verified the claim. We believe there are indeed few of us who know what _to love our neighbour as ourselves_ means; but when we find a man here and there in the course of centuries who does, we may take this man as the prophet of coming good for his race, his prophecy being himself. But next to the interest of knowing that a man could love so well, comes the association of this fact with his art. He who could look abroad upon men, and understand them all--who stood, as it were, in the wide-open gates of his palace, and admitted with welcome every one who came in sight--had in the inner places of that palace one chamber in which he met his friend, and in which his whole soul went forth to understand the soul of his friend. The man to whom nothing in humanity was common or unclean; in whom the most remarkable of his artistic morals is fair-play; who fills our hearts with a saintly love for _Cordelia_ and an admiration of _Sir John Falstaff_ the lost gentleman, mournful even in the height of our laughter; who could make an _Autolycus_ and a _Macbeth_ both human, and an _Ariel_ and a _Puck_ neither human--this is the man who loved best. And we believe that this depth of capacity for loving lay at the root of all his knowledge of men and women, and all his dramatic pre-eminence. The heart is more intelligent than the intellect. Well says the poet Matthew Raydon, who has hardly left anything behind him but the lamentation over Sir Philip Sidney in which the lines occur,--