As regards Modern Genius, Bacon’s assertion is so far from the truth, that it is quite safe to reverse it and say that it is doubtful whether any one but a man of genius is capable of that intense ardour of feeling which marks the climax of Love; doubtful whether even Romeo at his age could have felt a passion such as Shakspere’s glowing imagination painted. Love is based, not on what a man sees with his eyes, but on the mental image retouched by the imagination; and a man of genius, being a _virtuoso of the imagination_, can adorn his ideal of love with ornaments unknown to ordinary mortals; whence it follows that the passion inspired by his more vivid and beautiful image must be more intense than the passion inspired by less perfect visions in common, sluggish brains. And since artistic thought can no more crystallise into verse or epigram without the warm glow of emotion than a flower can grow into a thing of beauty without its daily bath of warm sunshine, it is fortunate that Genius implies a natural susceptibility to the æsthetic passion of Love. Fortunate also for the prospects of Romantic Love is the fact that Genius is king in its realms. Had not the sacred mysteries of Love been revealed to the world in the glowing language of poetry, it would probably have remained a thing unknown to ordinary mortals for centuries to come; even as the beauties of Nature, for which common minds have no eyes, would have remained undetected, had not the poets and artists disclosed the bonds that connect them with human sympathies. As all the quotations from poets given in this chapter (and in that on Hyperbole) practically bear witness to the exceptional ardour of Love in men of genius, only two cases need be cited as specimens—those of Burns and Heine. Gilbert Burns, the brother of the poet, writes that the latter “was constantly the victim of some fair enslaver. The symptoms of his passion were often such as nearly to equal those of the celebrated Sappho. I never, indeed, knew that he ‘fainted, sunk, and died away’; but the agitations of his mind and body exceeded anything of the kind I ever knew in real life.”