So far as the English goes, this verse is plain enough; but unless you have met with the same idea in some other English writer, you will find the meaning very obscure. The poet is speaking of a universal, or almost universal, experience of misplaced love. A man becomes passionately attached to a woman, who treats him with, cold indifference. Finally the lover finds out his mistake; the woman that he loved proves not to be what he imagined; she is not worthy of his love. Then what was he in love with? With a shadow out of his brain, with an imagination or ideal very pure and noble, but only an imagination. Supposing that he was worshipping good qualities in a noble woman, he deceived himself; the woman had no such qualities; they existed only in his fancy. Thus he calls her his mirror, the human being that seemed to be a reflection of all that was good in his own heart. She never knows the truth as to why the man loved her and then ceased to love her; he could not tell her, because it would have been to her "most perfect pain to learn." A less obscure but equally beautiful symbolism, in another metre, is "The Honeysuckle." I plucked a honeysuckle where The hedge on high is quick with thorn, And climbing for the prize, was torn, And fouled my feet in quag-water; And by the thorns and by the wind The blossom that I took was thinn'd, And yet I found it sweet and fair. Thence to a richer growth I came, Where, nursed in mellow intercourse, The honeysuckles sprang by cores, Not harried like my single stem, All virgin lamps of scent and dew. So from my hand that first I, threw, Yet plucked not any more of them.