Page:Love and its hidden history.djvu/138

 thesis to a consumptive for physic, administer fluxions to a woman in love, give a dose of Euclid to the man that's just left his wife. "Bah!" one year of love, even "ignorant" love, is worth all the "intellect" this side of Jupiter in its effect upon the soul and destiny of man or woman. Intellect was given as a guide to life. Love is life itself, and we feel ten times happier at a concert ball, opera, "love feast," or "prayer-meeting," than while listening to the grandest intellectual demonstrations this side of Orion. We will probe the matter deeper by and by; meantime consider me an advocate of the rights of women, and those of men likewise. — Of all God's creation the most pitiful object. Of all God's creation the most sorry and most sacred object. Of all beings made in the divine likeness, given a sense of immortality, an eye for the stars of midnight and the sun at noon, an ear for the murmur of the spring, and the deep cry of the mighty sea, rocked babe of the Great Mother, given a voice for the utterance of the things of the heart, — the one only whose eyes are never turned to heaven, whose ears are sealed to the spheral sounds, whose voice, untuned, rattles over a dry bed. Of all a little lower than the angels, the one only that wants the death of any brute. The only one — our Father help her! — that would have no flowers pointing with fragrance to her grave, no stone to stay the stranger's heel from trampling down her dust. Only to lie quietly, never to wake when this is over.

The street-walker haunts all the places of men. The city, with its walls so high that they veil the face of the sun, with stones that never cry out, and mingled sounds that drown the still small voice, is her only home. She has a memory of another scene, now and then. While it is light, and she lurks in her covert, shrinking from the searching eye of day, it sometimes crosses her mind,— a still and peaceful land, — cape, fields, a brook, a white church, a cottage with the vines about it, and there, under the tall trees before the door, with the sunset touching his thin face with glory, and the pleasant air blowing through his white hair, an old man fondling a child upon his knee, a child whose large eyes are turned trustful and truthful into his, and whose golden tresses embrace his neck. But she curses this vision, and drowns it with fire!