Ah, Love, let us be true To one another! For the world, which seems Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light Nor certitude nor peace, nor help for pain; Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, Where ignorant armies clash by night. This is not the mood, however, of those who are accessible to the transcendental experience; who believe that man is endowed with a sense which enables him to draw in life, and love and hope and inspiration from the unseen. The mystic and the transcendentalist is freighted on the side of hope and cheer, and in the presence of the great universe, cries out with joyous exultation: I know not where His islands lift I only know I cannot drift Beyond His love and care. It is one of the most amazing phases of the human mind, that nothing can quench its irresistible optimism. This is not only true of the individual, but of the race as well. As every man has his own dreams of joy and peace, in spite of present pain and sorrow; so humanity, as a whole, has ever dreamed of a beautiful world free from all imperfections and defects of this earth of ours. Thus has arisen the legend of the Golden Age, the Elysian Fields, the Islands of the Blest, the Earthly Paradise-where spring is eternal, where there is no rain, or hail, or snow, no pain or sorrow. In ancient times men believed this ideal dwelling-place to have been in the past; or in some far distant and inaccessible region of the earth. Since modern science has come in to tear away the veil of the unknown;-since the doctrine of evolution has completely changed men's views of the world,—the same instinct, which seems to be ineradically planted in the human breast-now looks forward to some time in the history of the race, when envy and hate and selfishness shall dis appear forever,-that blessed time when man shall grow more like to God, Through all the seasons of the golden year. But not only is this optinism of the race directed to the ideal of a perfect human society in this world; but, down to our own day, men have found no better symbol with which to express the hopes and aspirations of the soul,as to what we fondly speak of as the life beyond the grave, than the world-old fancy of an Earthly Paradise,-now transposed from the world of time to the eternal world. CHAPTER IV. ROMANTIC LOVE AND THE TRANSCEN- IT is a difficult thing to discuss the mystical phases of sexual love, and yet it is beyond any doubt that such states actually exist. As we have already described mysticism or transcendentalism as the sense of the Infinite, it naturally follows that it may be induced by almost any phase of that unseen reality,whether it is conceived under the form of Beauty, Goodness or Truth. The mystical philosopher is rapt in ecstasy at the contemplation of abstract truth; the religious man seeks union and communion with the Absolute Goodness; the poet, the artist, the lover of nature, animate or inanimate, feels the same emotion at the thought of Ideal Beauty. And as beyond the actual phenomena of nature, the imagination of man, the world over, has conceived the idea of the Golden Age, the Garden of the Hesperides, the Blessed Isles, and the Earthly Paradise, so in the modern world there has grown up the beautiful abstraction of womanly beauty, with all its nameless charm, to which Goethe has given the name of the "Ewig Weibliche." Says William James, speaking of the changes that come over us as we grow older, "where now is the young girl bringing with her an aura of infinity?" It is this "aura of infinity" alone that induces the mystical mood, to young or old. Nor is it true that as age comes on the Ewig Weibliche loses its charm. For though in middle and later age a man may become free from passion for the individual, yet the abstract idea of womanhood may become more and more beautiful as the years go by. Here as elsewhere the particular cannot give the mystical mood, except in so far as it shows the general and eternal beauty of which it is but a part. Sensuality, gallantry, the conventional traits of Troubadour and the cold con |