The whole of after-life depends very much upon how life’s transient transfiguration in youth by love is subsequently regarded; and the greatest of all the functions of the poet is to aid in his readers the fulfilment of the cry, which is that of nature as well as religion, “Let not my heart forget the things mine eyes have seen.” The greatest perversion of the poet’s function is to falsify the memory of that transfiguration of the senses, and to make light of its sacramental character. This character is instantly recognised by the unvitiated heart and apprehension of every youth and maiden; but it is very easily forgotten and profaned by most, unless its sanctity is upheld by priests and poets. Poets are naturally its prophets--all the more powerful because, like the prophets of old, they are wholly independent of the priests, and are often the first to discover and rebuke the lifelessness into which that order is always tending to fall. If society is to survive its apparently impending dangers, it must be mainly by guarding and increasing the purity of the sources in which society begins. The world is finding out, as it has often done before, and more or less forgotten, that it cannot do without religion. Love is the first thing to wither under its loss. What love does in transfiguring life, that religion does in transfiguring love: as any one may see who compares one state or time with another. Love is sure to be something less than human if it is not something more; and the so-called extravagances of the youthful heart, which always claims a character for divinity in its emotions, fall necessarily into sordid, if not shameful, reaction, if those claims are not justified to the understanding by the faith which declares man and woman to be priest and priestess to each other of relations inherent in Divinity itself, and proclaimed in the words “Let us make man in our own image” and “male and female created he them.” Nothing can reconcile the intimacies of love to the higher feelings, unless the parties to them are conscious--and true lovers always are--that, for the season at least, they justify the words “I have said, Ye are gods.” Nuptial love bears the clearest marks of being nothing other than the rehearsal of a communion of a higher nature. Its felicity consists in a perpetual conversion of phase from desire to sacrifice, and from sacrifice to desire, accompanied by unchangeable complaisance in the delight shining in the beauty of the beloved; and it is agitated in all its changes by fear, without which love cannot long exist as emotion. Such a state, in proportion to its fervour, delicacy, and perfection, is ridiculous unless it is regarded as a “great sacrament.” It is the inculcation of this significance which has made love between man and woman what it is now--at least to the idea and aspirations of all good minds. It is time that the sweet doctrine should be enforced more clearly.