It is customary for our bards gallantly to explain that the completeness of their domestic happiness leaves them no lurking discontent to spur them onto verse writing. This is the conclusion of the happily wedded heroes of Bayard Taylor's _A Poet's Journal_, and of Coventry Patmore's _The Angel in the House_; likewise of the poet in J. G. Holland's _Kathrina_, who excuses his waning inspiration after his marriage: She, being all my world, had left no room For other occupation than my love. ... I had grown enervate In the warm atmosphere which I had breathed. Taken as a whole, the evidence is decidedly in favor of the remote love, prevented in some way from reaching its culmination. To requote Alfred Noyes, the poet knows that ideal love must be Far off, beyond me, otherwise no star. [Footnote: Marlowe.] In _Sister Songs_ Francis Thompson asserts that such remoteness is essential to his genius: I deem well why life unshared Was ordained me of yore. In pairing time, we know, the bird Kindles to its deepmost splendour, And the tender Voice is tenderest in its throat. Were its love, forever by it, Never nigh it, It might keep a vernal note, The crocean and amethystine In their pristine Lustre linger on its coat. [Footnote: Possibly this is characteristic only of the male singer. Christina Rossetti expresses the opposite attitude in _Monna Innominata_ XIV, mourning for The silence of a heart that sang its songs When youth and beauty made a summer morn, Silence of love that cannot sing again.] Byron, in the _Lament of Tasso_, causes that famous lover likewise to maintain that distance is necessary to idealization. He sighs, Successful love may sate itself away. The wretched are the faithful; 'tis their fate To have all feeling save the one decay, And every passion into one dilate, As rapid rivers into ocean pour. But ours is bottomless and hath no shore. The manner of achieving this necessary remoteness is a nice problem. Of course the poet may choose it, with open eyes, as the Marlowe of Miss Peabody's imagination does, or as the minstrel in Hewlitt's _Cormac, Son of Ogmond_. The long engagements of Rossetti and Tennyson are often quoted as exemplifying this idiosyncrasy of poets. But there is something decidedly awkward in such a situation, inasmuch as it is not till love becomes so intense as to eclipse the poet's pride and joy in poetry that it becomes effective as a muse. [Footnote: See Mrs. Browning, Sonnet VII. And this! this lute and song, loved yesterday, Are only dear, the singing angels know Because thy name moves right in what they say.] The minor poet, to be sure, is often discovered solicitously feeling his pulse to gauge the effect of love on his rhymes, but one does not feel that his verse gains by it. Therefore, an external obstacle is usually made to intervene.