Not cruel, relentless, impotently anarchic, chaotically potent, this Mater Genetrix. We see her thus, who are flying threads in the loom she weaves. But she is patient, abiding, certain, inviolate, and silent ever. It is only when we come to this vision of her whom we call Isis or Hera or Orchil, or one of a hundred other names, our unknown Earth-Mother, that men and women will know each other aright, and go hand in hand along the road of Life without striving to crush, to subdue, to usurp, to retaliate, to separate.
Ah, fair vision of humanity to come! man and woman side by side, sweet, serene, true, simple, natural, fulfilling Earth's and Heaven's behests; unashamed, unsophisticated, unaffected, each to each and for each; children of one mother, inheritors of a like destiny, and, at the last, artificers of an equal fate.
Pondering thus, Alan rose and looked out into the night. In that great stillness, wherein the moonlight lay like the visible fragrance of the earth, he gazed long and intently. How shadowy, now, were these lives that had so lately palpitated in this very place; how strange their silence, their incommunicable knowledge, their fathomless peace!
Was it all lost ... the long endurance of pain, the pangs of sorrow? If so, what was the lesson of life? Surely, to live with sweet serenity and gladness, content against the inevitable hour. There is solace of a kind in the idea of a common end, of that terrible processional march of life wherein the myriad is momentary, and the immeasurable is but a passing shadow. But, alas! it is only solace of a kind; for what heart that has beat to the pulse of love can relinquish the sweet dream of life, and what coronal can philosophy put upon the brows of youth in place of eternity?
No, no! of this he felt sure. In the Beauty of the World lies the ultimate redemption of our mortality. When we shall become at one with nature, in a sense profounder even than the poetic imaginings of most of us, we shall understand what now we fail to discern. The arrogance of those who would have the stars as candles for our night, and the universe as a pleasaunce for our thought, will be as impossible as the blind fatuity of those who say we are of dust, briefly vitalized, that shall be dust again, with no fragrance saved from the rude bankruptcy of life, no beauty raised up against the sun to bloom anew.
It is no idle dream, this; no idle dream that we are a perishing clan among the sons of God, because of this slow waning of our joy, of our passionate delight in the Beauty of the World. We have been unable to look out upon the shining of our star, for the vision overcomes us; and we have used veils which we call "scenery," "picturesqueness," and the like—poor, barren words that are so voiceless and remote before the rustle of leaves and the lap of water; before the ancient music of the wind, and all the sovran eloquence of the tides of light. But a day may come—nay, shall surely come—when indeed the poor and the humble shall inherit the earth; they who have not made a league with temporal evils, and out of whose heart shall arise the deep longing, that shall become universal, of the Renewal of Youth.
Often, in the days that followed their return to Kerival, Alan and Ynys talked of these hopes and fears. And, gradually, out of the beauty of the spring, out of the intensity of the green fire of life which everywhere flamed in the brown earth, on the hills, in the waters, in the heart and brain of man, in the whole living, breathing world, was born of them a new joy. They were as the prince and princess of the fairy tales, for whom every thing was wonderful. Hand in hand they entered into the kingdom of youth. It was theirs, thenceforth; and all the joy of the world.