Page:Famous Single Poems (1924).djvu/190

 human race is incurably romantic. It longs to believe that, however drab life may be in the immediate vicinity, somewhere else, in some happier clime, hearts are always light, virtue always rewarded, and high and passionate love the rule instead of the rare exception. Romance, romance—it is what every one sighs for and endeavors to experience—if not in person, at least by proxy; if not in one’s own life, then in a novel or a play or a movie.

Sometimes even in a poem!

Thousands and thousands of simple hearts have been wrung by Whittier’s pastoral of Maud Muller and the sentimental Judge, who used to sit and dream of her

after he had ridden away and

and millions of sighs have been evoked by the concluding lines: