Page:Randolph, Paschal Beverly; Eulis! the history of love.djvu/74

Rh them. Thus mentally they can heal themselves, become healthy, and gain the new life, energy, and power.

We now pass to the consideration of one of ihc most strange and aberant phases of love—if love he not a misnomer as applied to it—with which the mind has to grapple during its search into the mazy labyrinths concealed beneath the human form.

XXXII. If it was possible for me to look upon this broad world and broader universe with the jaundiced eyes of some zealot, full of bile, gloom, bitterness and bigotry; if I were capable of believing that God is not all good; if I could imagine a yawning gulf, and it peopled with tortured souls, whose agonizing shrieks for sudden death were answered back by the exultant shouts of jubilant fiends, with a at their head,—which I can't—but if I could, then would I believe that from that pit, clean back of the shadow of God, came trooping forth a score of superlatively horrible gorgons, destined by the mandate of the chief fiend to desolate the earth, and torment mankind, among which, one, always clad in rays of light, yet sweltering with venom at its heart, stands among the foremost. I mean that awful thing for which in English there is no name, but which ever and always assumes the garb and mien and office of the bright, heaven-born angel, LOVE. In other of my books I have named this pestilent thing Vampiyrism.

Now the name is familiar to everybody, because, in the first place it pertains to a monstrous leech which inhabits tropical waters; fastens on to whatever has sentient life, and never lets go until the last drop of blood is sucked out, and the victim topples into the arms of death. Secondly, the same name is applied to a huge bat inhabiting dark caverns in Oriental and other lands, darkness and gloom being its natural habitat; and when man or beasts travelling along that way chance to fall asleep, this bat of Hades stealthily approaches, and gently, soothingly, flaps its huge wings, croning and droning its wierd sing-song the while; thus fanning its victims, until a deep, comatic sleep falls upon them, so hard and strong, that not a stir is made while the bat opens a vein, and drinks its fill of living gore!

When the awaking crimes, the eves open in another world than this, tor mankind, never at all for beasts. The name in the third use