As often as not, this obstacle is the indifference of the beloved. One finds rejected poets by the dozens, mourning in the verse of our period. The sweetheart's reasons are manifold; her suitor's inferior station and poverty being favorites. But one wonders if the primary reason may not be the quality of the love offered by the poet, whose extreme humility and idealization are likely to engender pride and contempt in the lady, she being unaware that it is the reflection of his own soul that the poet is worshipping in her. One can feel some sympathy with the lady in Thomas Hardy's _I Rose Up as My Custom Is_, who, when her lover's ghost discovers her beside a snoring spouse, confesses that she is content with her lot: He makes no quest into my thoughts, But a poet wants to know What one has felt from earliest days, Why one thought not in other ways, And one's loves of long ago. It may be, too, that an instinct for protection has something to do with the lady's rejection, for a recent poet has openly proclaimed the effect of attaining, in successful love, one step toward absolute beauty: O beauty, as thy heart o'erflows In tender yielding unto me, A vast desire awakes and grows Unto forgetfulness of thee. [Footnote: "A. E.," _The Fountain of Shadowy Beauty_.] Rejection is apt to prove an obstacle of double worth to the poet, since it not only removes him to a distance where his lady's human frailties are less visible, so that the divine light shining through her seems less impeded, but it also fires him with a very human ambition to prove his transcendent worth and thus "get even" with his unappreciative beloved. [Footnote: See Joaquin Miller, _Ina_; G. L. Raymond, _"Loving,"_ from _A Life in Song_; Alexander Smith, _A Life Drama_. Richard Realf in _Advice Gratis_ satirically depicts the lady's altruism in rejecting her lover: It would strike fresh heat in your poet's verse If you dropped some aloes into his wine, They write supremely under a curse.] There is danger, of course, that the disillusionment produced by the revelation of low ideals which the lady makes in her refusal will counterbalance these good effects. Still, though the poet is so egotistical toward all the world beside, in his attitude toward his lady the humility which Emerson expresses in _The Sphinx_ is not without parallel in verse. Many singers follow him in his belief that the only worthy love is that for a being so superior that a return of love is impossible. [Footnote: See _The Sphinx_-- Have I a lover who is noble and free? I would he were nobler than to love me. See also Walt Whitman, _Sometimes with One I Love_, and Mrs. Browning, "I never thought that anyone whom I could love would stoop to love me--the two things seemed clearly incompatible." Letter to Robert Browning, December 24, 1845.]