People will read those earlier poems as long as they love gardens and the frisky joy of flocks, and the swift upsoaring flight of the eagle above the mountain-tops, and all the innumerable many-twinkling smile of Nature. For so I should have called her first volume: not the _Innumerable Heart_ (she had not yet grown a heart) but the _Innumerable Smile_, ‘ανἠριθμoν γελασμα. That something mad, and fierce, and glad, and living, can never come again, nor that heroic impatience of mortality--and morality. Our Muse is no longer twenty. Like Thekla she has ‘geliebt und gelebet’; she has discovered that inner universe which has no common measure with the material world; she has loved and parted; she has loved and lost; she has looked on the icy face of Death and trembled; she has stood on the pale verge of the unknown abyss. As we read these lyrics for their splendid music we gradually perceive the motives of the symphony. There is more here than beauty. There is a secret story intricately involved, as in Shakespeare’s sonnets or Elizabeth Browning’s. The first poems confess the end of a passion, still deep, and quick, but full of quarrels and combats; we feel the inevitable rupture close at hand, and the disenchantment which notes the death of a sentiment that our muse had believed immortal:-- ‘Te souviens-tu du temps où, les regards tendus Vers l’espace, ma main entre tes mains gisante, J’exigeai de régner sur la mer de Lépante, Dans quelque baie heureuse, aux parfums suspendus, Où l’orgueil et l’amour halcettent confundus? ‘À présent, épuisée, immobile ou errante, J’abdique sans effort le destin qui m’est dû. Quel faste comblerait une âme indifferente? ‘Je n’ai besoin de rien puisque je t’ai perdu.’ The lovers separate. The meeting had seemed a prodigy. But the Muse, in a cloud of poetry, has declared to her votaress her jealousy of a mortal lover:-- ‘On n’est pas à la fois enivrée et heureuse, L’univers dans vos bras n’aura pas de rival.’ and the great poet (who has also the misfortune to be a young and beautiful woman) bids her lover farewell, much as the immortal Diana may have dismissed Endymion:-- ‘Allez vers votre simple et calme destinée; Et, comme la lueur d’un phare diligent Suit longtemps sur la mer les barques étonnées. Je verserai sur vous ma lumière d’argent.’ In vain he protests and begs her to consider how void and out of shape her days will hang, bereft of the substance of so rare an affection. A dreary isolation, a self-centred ambition, are surely less propitious to poetry than a sympathy communicated, not only between two hearts, but between two minds? (The man’s part of the dialogue we must more or less supply.) The fact is, she is tired of him, or rather of the storm and stress of passion, and she replies with an absent look:-- ‘Je n’avais plus besoin de vous pour vous aimer....’