dead--he is not dead! he will come back to me! He promised it--he will
come back to me! This long, dreary waiting is only a test of my loyalty
and love! I will be patient, for he will come back to me! He will come
back to me!"
This world would be a sorry place if most men conducted their lives on the
Robert Burns plan. Burns was affectionate, tender, generous and kind; but
he was not wise. He never saw the future, nor did he know that life is a
sequence, and that if you do this, it is pretty sure to lead to that. His
loves were largely of the earth.
Excess was a part of his wayward, undisciplined nature; and that constant
tendency to put an enemy in his mouth to steal away his brains, bound him
at last, hand and foot. His old age could never have been frosty, but
kindly--it would have been babbling, irritable, senile, sickening. Death
was kind and reaped him young. Sex was the rock on which Robert Burns
split. He seemed to regard pleasure-seeking as the prime end of life, and
in this he was not so very far removed from the prevalent "civilized"
society notion of marriage. But it is a phantasmal idea, and makes a mock
of marriage, serving the satirist his excuse.
To a great degree the race is yet barbaric, and as a people we fail
utterly to touch the hem of the garment of Divinity. We have been mired in
the superstition that sex is unclean, and therefore honesty and free
expression in love matters have been tabued.
But the day will yet dawn when we will see that it takes two to generate
thought; that there is the male man and the female man, and only where
these two walk together hand in hand is there a perfect sanity and a
perfect physical, moral and spiritual health.
We reach infinity through the love of one, and loving this one, we are in
love with all. And this condition of mutual sympathy, trust, reverence,
forbearance and gentleness that can exist between a man and a woman, gives
the only hint of Heaven that mortals ever know. From the love of man for
woman we guess the love of God, just as the scientist from a single bone
constructs the skeleton--aye! and then clothes it with a complete garment.
In their love-affairs women are seldom wise, or men just. How should we
expect them to be when but yesterday woman was a chattel and man a
slave-owner? Woman won by diplomacy--that is to say, by trickery and
untruth, and man had his way through force, and neither is quite willing
to disarm. An amalgamated pers
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