Chapter 4 No.4

Love, Fate, Love's object, and cold Jealousy,

Delight me, and torment, content me, and afflict.

The insensate boy, the blind and sinister,

The loftiest beauty, and my death alone

Show to me paradise, and take away,

Present me with all good, and steal it from me,

So that the heart, the mind, the spirit, and the soul,

Have joy, pain, cold, and weight in their control.

Who will deliver me from war?

Who give to me the fruit of love in peace?

And that which vexes that which pleases me

(Opening the gates of heaven and closing them)

Who will set far apart

To make acceptable my fires and tears?

He shows the reason and origin of passion; and whence it is conceived; and how enthusiasm is born, by ploughing the field of the Muses and scattering the seed of his thoughts and waiting for the fruitful harvest, discovering in himself the fervour of the affections instead of in the sun, and in place of the rain is the moisture of his eyes. He brings forward four things: Love, Fate, the Object, and Jealousy. Here love is not a low, ignoble, and unworthy motor, but a noble lord and chief. Fate is none other than the pre-ordained disposition and order of casualties to which he is subject by his destiny. The object is the thing loved and the correlative of the lover. Jealousy, it is clear, must be the ardour of the lover about the thing loved, of which it boots not to speak to him who knows what love is, and which it is vain to try to explain to others. Love delights, because to him who loves it is a pleasure to love; and he who really loves would not cease from loving. This is referred to in the following sonnet: