Then in _Youth and Art_, in _Dis Aliter Visum_, in _Bifurcation_, in _The Lost Mistress_, and in _Too Late_, he records the opposite fate, and in characters so distinct that the repetition of the motive is not monotonous.

These are studies of the Might-have-beens of love.
Another motive, used with varied circumstance in three or four poems, but fully expanded in _James Lee's Wife_, is the discovery, after years of love, that love on one side is lost irretrievably.

Another motive is, that rather than lose love men or women will often sacrifice their conscience, their reason, or their liberty.

This sacrifice, of all that makes our nobler being for the sake of personal love alone, brings with it, because the whole being is degraded, the degradation, decay, and death of personal love itself.
Another set of poems describes with fanciful charm, sometimes with happy gaiety, love at play with itself.

True love makes in the soul an unfathomable ocean in whose depths are the imaginations of love, serious, infinite, and divine.