But the special reason I wished to call attention to Victor Hugo’s lyric is that it has that particular quality called by philosophical critics “cosmic emotion.”  Cosmic emotion means the highest quality of human emotion.  The word “cosmos” signifies the universe—­not simply this world, but all the hundred millions of suns and worlds in the known heaven.  And the adjective “cosmic” means, of course, “related to the whole universe.”  Ordinary emotion may be more than individual in its relations.  I mean that your feelings may be moved by the thought or the perception of something relating not only to your own life but also to the lives of many others.  The largest form of such ordinary emotion is what would be called national feeling, the feeling of your own relation to the whole nation or the whole race.  But there is higher emotion even than that.  When you think of yourself emotionally not only in relation to your own country, your own nation, but in relation to all humanity, then you have a cosmic emotion of the third or second order.  I say “third or second,” because whether the emotion be second or third rate depends very much upon your conception of humanity as One.  But if you think of yourself in relation not to this world only but to the whole universe of hundreds of millions of stars and planets—­in relation to the whole mystery of existence—­then you have a cosmic emotion of the highest order.  Of course there are degrees even in this; the philosopher or the metaphysician will probably have a finer quality of cosmic emotion than the poet or the artist is able to have.  But lovers very often, according to their degree of intellectual culture, experience a kind of cosmic emotion; and Victor Hugo’s little poem illustrates this.  Night and the stars and the abyss of the sky all seem to be thrilling with love and beauty to the lover’s eyes, because he himself is in a state of loving happiness; and then he begins to think about his relation to the universal life, to the supreme mystery beyond all Form and Name.

A third or fourth class of such emotion may be illustrated by the beautiful sonnet of Keats, written not long before his death.  Only a very young man could have written this, because only a very young man loves in this way—­but how delightful it is!  It has no title.

  Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art—­
    Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
  And watching, with eternal lids apart,
    Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
  The moving waters at their priest-like task
    Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
  Or gazing on new soft-fallen mask
    Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—­

  No—­yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
    Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
  To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
    Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
  Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
  And so live ever—­or else swoon to death.