text:  For though the chief and most potent of human passions has never lacked its place at the side of war in the song that spoke of heroes--though two beautiful captives and a runaway wife bestowed by the Goddess of Beauty and herself the paragon of beauty to all tongues and ages have grounded the _Iliad_--though the Scaean gate from which Hector began to flee his inevitable foe and where that goddess-born foe himself stooped to destiny be also remembered for the last parting of a husband and a wife--though Circe and Calypso have hindered homebound Ulysses from the longing arms of Penelope--and Jason leading the flower of a prior and yet more heroic generation must first win the heart of Medea before he may attain the Golden Fleece--though the veritable nature of the human being have ever thus through its strongest passion imaged itself in its most exquisite mirror Poetry--yet there did in reawaking Europe a new love-poetry arise distinctively characterised by the omnipotence which it ascribed to the Love-god legitimating in him an usurped supremacy and exhibiting in artificial and wilful excess that passion which the older poets drew in its powerful but unexaggerated and natural proportions