The young men of India, the young men of China, the young men of Russia, the young men of America—I see them working together in the wondrous story of life, as it reels off in the years to come—mating of the East and West, the planet seen in one piece, the communal spirit of the Hive around the globe.
... I find myself getting up a rather serious intensity over what Romance means, a signal to tame down.... Not to stay—to drain nothing, to leave all cleaner, more orderly and richer for one's tarrying, to glance but lightly, yet with a deep smile of understanding at the torrent of detached and unmatched things which apparently makes the world—to love it all better than those caught in detachment can possibly love one another—to belong to the many by remaining apart from separate movements—at last to be the Spectator....
One may deal lightly with crowds, but never with man or woman.... One may say he has all that civilisation has for any human creature; he may reasonably be bored by all departments of life, but there is enough for an eternity of reverent study and adoration in the nearest human face. The lovelier the human face, the more easily we can discern the divine in it.... You get nowhere without loving something. This is the hardest kind of material gospel.... We are all incognito—the greater we are, the less perfectly disguised.
First and last our dream of Romance means Motherhood—mysterious enactments that the mere male can never know, no longer the motherhood of the mammal, but the coming of the Guest, the Shining One—the giving of body and mind and soul, no fear, no stipulation, no impeding form of thought—more than that, it means a giving of the child to the world.... The Valley Road Girl expresses it in this sharp, short picture:
Once a woman lived in a dense forest, and had a man-child alone there. As it grew, the woman impressed upon it the greatness of God and the wonder of all things. Then one day, she led him by the forest-paths to the Highway, and left him there.
It means the Madonna who looks up, rather than down, at the head upon her breast.
The creative force is never wasted. Man and woman, in love or lust, are never alone—rather startling, but sooner or later to be accepted. The point of the triangle is either turned downward or upward. The creative force feeds either the abominations of the underworld, or is used in its designed order and loveliness as a point of inception for soul into form.... The mother-nature of the New Race must be quickened by the ideal of the coming of a World-teacher, of development a cycle ahead of this race. Women must partake of this dream in their maternities. It is the light of such an advent, shining upon the upturned face of the mother, that touches the brow of the child with light.