ambling for the restoration of that equilibrium.
The choice made may be good or ill, as chance and time may dictate, but
the impelling excitement forces a choice. What if it be ill? What if
to-morrow a male who is a far better complement should appear? The time
is now. Nature is not neglectful, and well she knows the disaster of
delay. She is prodigal of the individual and is satisfied with one
match out of many mismatches, just as she is satisfied that of a million
cod eggs one only should develop into a full-grown cod. And so this love
of the human in no wise differs from that of the sparrow which forgets
preservation in procreation. Thus nature tricks her creatures and the
race lives on.

For the lesser creatures the trick serves the purpose well. There is
need for a compelling madness, else would self-preservation overcome
procreation and there be no lesser creatures. And man is content to rest
coequal with the beast in the matter of mating. Notwithstanding his
intelligence, which has made him the master of matter and enabled him to
enslave the great blind forces, he is unable to perpetuate his species
without the aid of the impelling madness. Nay, men will not have it
otherwise; and when an individual urges that his reason has placed him
above the beast, and that, without the impelling madness, he can mate
with greater wisdom and potency, then the poets and singers rise up and
fling potsherds at him. To improve upon nature by draining a malarial
swamp is permitted him; to improve upon nature's methods and breed
swifter carrier-pigeons and finer horses than she has ever bred is also
permitted; but to improve upon nature in the breeding of the human, that
is a sacrilege which cannot be condoned! Down with him! He is a brute to
question our divine Love, God-given and glorious!

Ah, Dane, remember the first dim yearning of divided life, and the soils
and smirches and frenzies put upon it by the spawn of multitudinous
generations. There is your love, the whole history of it. There is no
intrinsic shame in the thing itself, but the shame lies in that we are
not greater than it.

HERBERT.

XVIII

FROM THE SAME TO THE SAME

THE RIDGE,
BERKELEY, CALIFORNIA.
April 4, 19--.

There were several things in your letter which I forgot to answer. Much
of beauty and wonder is there in what you have said, and unrelated facts
without end. Many of those facts I endorse heartily, but it seems to me
you fail to embody