INTRODUCTION. THE subject of this Volume is LOVE,-the one great affection of the heart, that binds the human family together, irrespective of age, sex, or condition; that links the child to the parent, and the parent to the child; that glows in the breast of youth, irradiates the countenance of age, and sheds a divine light on the pathway of man's life, from the cradle to the grave. In the Literature of every nation, ancient or modern, whether called by the name of Love or by that of Domestic Affection, this passion plays a prominent part. Whether its examples be drawn from the cottage or the palace, from the forests and wilds of the savage, or from the cities of civilized man, Love is the inner spirit of Romance and Poetry, both of which combine to invest it with every charm of Fancy and Imagination; and either in its joys or its sorrows, its hopes or its fears, its struggles or its triumphs, to exalt it as the one great feeling and incident of life. To Poetry more especially belongs the duty of celebrating the beauty and the purity of Affection, and of linking together the two great principles of Love to God and Love to Man. In the poetry of no language have the freshness, and it may be said the holiness, of this sentiment, and the paramount beauty of the Home Affections, been more exquisitely pourtrayed than in that of England; and the poets of the last sixty or seventy years may be truly said to have surpassed all their predecessors-Shakspeare and Milton alone excepted-in the tenderness and beauty of their illustrations of this great passion, and the multifarious incidents of joy and sorrow which mark its progress. In the less advanced period of literature which intervened between the days of Milton and those of Wordsworth and his great contemporaries, Love was too commonly treated by the rhymers and versifiers, and even by those worthy of the higher name of poets, in a Greek and Roman, and consequently a Heathen spirit. Cupid, Venus, and Hymen were as pertinaciously and unwarrantably introduced, as if Christian readers believed in these names, or could be moved in the most infinitesimal degree by them; and the poetry of Love, or that single exemplification of the feeling which may be best described by the word amatory, became a mere play of the fancy. As it did not spring from the hearts of the writers, it could not touch the hearts of the readers. But as the public taste improved, and new and great poets arose, (as they did so plentifully at the end of the last and beginning of the present century,) these inane compositions fell into wellmerited contempt; and Love in its wildest and most universal accepta b |