heaven is not prayer nor praise but the fullness of
life, which is only divined through the richness and variety of life
on earth. There is a certain infinitude in the emotions of love,
tenderness, pity, joy, and all that is begotten in love, and this
limitless character of the emotions has never received the philosophical
consideration which is due to it, for even laughter may be considered
solemnly, and gaiety and joy in us are the shadowy echoes of that joy
spoken of the radiant Morning Stars, and there is not an emotion in man
or woman which has not, however perverted and muddied in its coming,
in some way flowed from the first fountain. We are no more divided from
supernature than we are from our own bodies, and where the life of
man or woman is naturally most intense it most naturally overflows and
mingles with the subtler and more lovely world within. If religion has
no word to say upon this it is incomplete, and we wander in the narrow
circle of prayers and praise, wondering all the while what is it we are
praising God for, because we feel so melancholy and lifeless. Dante had
a place in his Inferno for the joyless souls, and if his conception
be true the population of that circle will be largely modern Irish.
A reaction against this conventional restraint is setting in, and the
needs of life will perhaps in the future no longer be violated as they
are today; and since it is the pent-up flood of the joy which ought to
be in life which is causing this reaction, and since there is a divine
root in it, it is difficult to say where it might not carry us; I hope
into some renewal of ancient conceptions of the fundamental purpose of
womanhood and its relations to Divine Nature, and that from the temples
where woman may be instructed she will come forth, with strength in
her to resist all pleading until the lover worship in her a divine
womanhood, and that through their love the divided portions of the
immortal nature may come together and be one as before the beginning of
worlds.

1904

THE RENEWAL OF YOUTH

I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravel'd world.....
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
--Ulysses

I.

Humanity is no longer the child it was at the beginning of the world.
The spirit which prompted by some divine intent, flung itself long ago
into a vagu