witching loveliness of satisfying every desire, enthralling the
imagination, rousing in the heart that passion which inspires the mind
to regions where it throbs in harmony with the Divine, and touches--as
might some dying desert-waif with his parched lips a cooling
fountain--the very source of love itself. But the most of human
love--how debased and debasing, how vile! God, for purposes of His own,
links for mankind the Aphroditic passion to the love Divine. The two are
separable, and man assuredly separates them. True love may be witnessed
as low in the scale of life, and as high, as consciousness is found. We
find it in the heart of the faithful animal that dies on a loved
master's grave, howling in anguish its life away. And we find it in the
purity of woman's heart, where it rests ready for the contact that is to
ignite it into illumination forever. Woman herself is divine. Man has
placed her everywhere, sometimes behind the barred doors of a harem,
sometimes on the throne of empire; but he has not blotted out the
divine.

"With Pym it may not have been a love that would have carried him safely
into and through a beatific old age--or it may have been; we choose to
think that it was a growth that would have bloomed perennially. It was,
I think, such a love as every man of imagination feels to be a mountain
of wealth beside which all else is dwarfed to utter nothingness--a
concretion from the endless and eternal ocean of love--a glimpse into
that paradise where exists the Almighty, who is Love.

"I should judge from what Peters knows well enough, but which I gleaned
by patient toil from that wicked though unsophisticated old segment of
intelligence, that these two young persons had a most delightful, though
extremely peculiar, wedding journey. The months had flown, until it was
again December--the antarctic midsummer month, in which, and the greater