Let _her_ be comprehended in the frame Of these Illusions, or they please no more. In later years the two sonnets on his wife's picture set on that love the consecration of faithful age; and there are those who can recall his look as he gazed on the picture and tried to recognize in that aged face the Beloved who to him was ever young and fair,--a look as of one dwelling in life-long affections with the unquestioning single-heartedness of a child. And here it might have been thought that as his experience ended his power of description would have ended too. But it was not so. Under the powerful stimulus of the sixth _Æneid_--allusions to which pervade _Laodamia_ [5] throughout--with unusual labour, and by a strenuous effort of the imagination, Wordsworth was enabled to depict his own love _in excelsis_, to imagine what aspect it might have worn, if it had been its destiny to deny itself at some heroic call, and to confront with nobleness an extreme emergency, and to be victor (as Plato has it) in an Olympian contest of the soul. For, indeed, the "fervent, not ungovernable, love," which is the ideal that Protesilaus is sent to teach, is on a great scale the same affection which we have been considering in domesticity and peace; it is love considered not as a revolution but as a consummation; as a self-abandonment not to a laxer but to a sterner law; no longer as an invasive passion, but as the deliberate habit of the soul. It is that conception of love which springs into being in the last canto of Dante's _Purgatory_,--which finds in English chivalry a noble voice,-- I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not honour more. [Footnote 5: _Laodamia_ should be read (as it is given in Mr. Matthew Arnold's admirable volume of selections) with the _earlier_ conclusion: the _second_ form is less satisfactory, and the _third_, with its sermonizing tone, "thus all in vain exhorted and reproved," is worst of all.] For, indeed, (even as Plato says that Beauty is the splendour of Truth,) so such a Love as this is the splendour of Virtue; it is the unexpected spark that flashes from self-forgetful soul to soul, it is man's standing evidence that he "must lose himself to find himself," and that only when the veil of his personality has lifted from around him can he recognize that he is already in heaven. In a second poem inspired by this revived study of classical antiquity Wordsworth has traced the career of Dion,--the worthy pupil of Plato, the philosophic ruler of Syracuse, who allowed himself to shed blood unjustly, though for the public good, and was haunted by a spectre symbolical of this fatal error. At last Dion was assassinated, and the words in which the poet tells his fate seem to me to breathe the very triumph of philosophy, to paint with a touch the greatness of a spirit which makes of Death himself a deliverer, and has its strength in the unseen.