All this is in the true Shaksperian key of Romantic Love, as are the Love-letters of Burns, Byron, Moore, Heine, Bürger, Lenau, and most other poets. Room must be made here for a few extracts from Lenau’s letters to his love, which, in some respects, resemble those of Keats—equally polished, poetic, deep, and sincere:— “It makes me melancholy to see how incapable I am of sympathizing with the pleasures of my friends. My Love goes out afar towards you; it hearkens and listens and stares in the distance for you, and takes no note of all the love by which it is surrounded here. I am truly ill. I constantly think of you alone and death. It often seems to me as if my time had expired. I cannot write poetry, I cannot rejoice in anything, cannot hope, can only think of you and death. The other day I wrote to you to take good care of your health—though I myself feel so little desire to live.” “The whole evening I was unable to think of anything but of you and the possibility of losing you. The large crowd of people seemed to have assembled on purpose to show me most painfully what a mere nothing the world would be to me if I had to part from you. I constantly saw but your face, your lovely, divine eye.” “Alexander wishes me to go to the baths at Leuk with him. He is quite ill. But I cannot go. If I have to see Switzerland without you, I prefer not to see it at all.” “My poetic composition is in a bad way. Though a thought sprouts in me here and there, it withers before it has reached maturity. When I go to see you I shall bring along a dry wreath of prematurely-faded poetic blossoms, and make them revive in your presence, as there are warm fountains dipped into which faded flowers blossom again.” “I have lost all pleasure in other people when you are absent. If you had only been at Weinsberg! Even the Æolian harps did not produce the usual impression on me.” It is noticeable how the overtone of Monopoly is accented in all these plaints. “I have found in your companionship more evidence of an eternal life than in all my investigations and studies of nature. Whenever, in a happy hour, I believed I had reached the climax of Love and the proper moment for death, since a more delicious moment could never follow: it was on each occasion an illusion, for another hour followed in which I loved you still more deeply. These ever new, ever deeper abysses of life convince me of its immortality. To-day I saw in your eyes the full measure of the divine. Most distinctly did I perceive to-day that the swelling and sinking of the eye is the breathing of the soul. In an eye of such beauty as yours we can see, as in a prophetic hieroglyphic, the essence of which some day our immortal body will consist. If I die, I shall depart rich, for I have seen what is most beautiful in the world.”