tur mihi_. (Here is a deity stronger than I,
who, coming, shall rule over me.)"

And, loverlike, he records of "this youngest of the angels" that "her
dress on that day was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly
crimson, girdled and adorned in such sort as best suited with her very
tender age." Ah! that "little frock," that sacred little frock we first
saw her in! Don't we all know it? And the little handkerchief, scented
like the breath of heaven, we begged as a sacred relic! And--

Long after you are dead
I will kiss the shoes of your feet....

Yes! anything she has worn or touched; for, as a modern writer has said:

Everything a woman wears or touches immediately incarnates something
of herself. A handkerchief, a glove, a flower--with a breath she
endows them with immortal souls.

Waller with his girdle, Donne with "that subtle wreath of hair about his
arm," the mediaeval knight riding at tourney with his lady's sleeve at
his helm, and all relic-worshipping lovers through the ages bear witness
to that divine supernaturalism of woman. To touch the hem of that little
frock, to kiss the mere imprint of those little feet, is to be purified
and exalted. But when did man affect woman in that way? I am tolerably
well read in the poetry of woman's emotions, but I recall no parallel
expressions of feeling. No passionate apostrophes of his golf stockings
come to my mind, nor wistful recollections of the trousers he wore on
that never-to-be-forgotten afternoon. The immaculate collar that spanned
his muscular throat finds no Waller to sing it:

A narrow compass--and yet there
Dwelt all that's good, and all that's fair,

and probably the smartest negligee shirt that ever sported with the
summer winds on a clothes-line has never caused the smallest flutter in
feminine bosoms. The very suggestion is, of course, absurd--whereas with
women, in very deed, it is as with the temple in Keats's lines:

... even as the trees
That whisper round a temple become soon
Dear as the temple's self.

Properly understood, therefore, the cult of the skirt-dancer has a
religious significance, and man's preoccupation with petticoats is but
the popular recognition of the divinity of woman. All that she is and
does and wears has a ritualistic character, and she herself commands our
reverence because we feel her to be the vessel of sacred mysteries, t