an error to suppose that any beauty of expression can exaggerate, can
indeed more than suggest, the beauty of its truth. Woman is all that
poets have said of her, and all that poets can never say:

Always incredible hath seemed the rose,
And inconceivable the nightingale--

and the poet's adoration of her is but the articulate voice of man's
love since the beginning, a love which is as mysterious as she herself
is a mystery.

However some may try to analyse man's love for woman, to explain it, or
explain it away, belittle it, nay, even resent and befoul it, it remains
an unaccountable phenomenon, a "mystery we make darker with a name."
Biology, cynically pointing at certain of its processes, makes the
miracle rather more miraculous than otherwise. Musical instruments are
no explanation of music. "Is it not strange that sheep's guts should
hale souls out of men's bodies?" says Benedick, in _Much Ado About
Nothing_, commenting on Balthazar's music. But they do, for all that,
though no one considers sheep's gut the explanation. To cry "sex" and to
talk of nature's mad preoccupation with the species throws no light on
the matter, and robs it of no whit of its magic. The rainbow remains a
rainbow, for all the sciences. And woman, with or without the suffrage,
stenographer or princess, is of the rainbow. She is beauty made flesh
and dwelling amongst us, and whatever the meaning and message of beauty
may be, such is the meaning of woman on the earth--her meaning, at all
events, for men. That is, she is the embodiment, more than any other
creature, of that divine something, whatever it may be, behind matter,
that spiritual element out of which all proceeds, and which mysteriously
gives its solemn, lovely and tragic significance to our mortal day.