Between this and the mating of true men and women, who, in gratitude for Love, pay tribute joyfully to Life in lives to follow after them, is all the vital difference, in impulse and emotion, between the Ship of Love--with its mysterious freight--immured within a narrow lock whereof the gate to the Beyond is sealed, and the Ship of Love launched free upon the open sea of Human Destiny--a Shining sea of Faith and Hope, which tides beyond the narrow mortal gateway toward a Great Unknown; Remote, Illimitable, Veiled in Everlasting Silence. _This_ ship fares forth upon its voyage of Mystery, beatified by full surrender of all lesser issues to that sacred one of the Eternal Human--a surrender which endues true marriage with tenderness and awe and beauty. * * * * * _Do we not pitch our songs too low, O sweet--my Singers?_ CHAPTER IX THE IMPENDING SUBJECTION OF MAN "The Earth never tires.... Nature is rude and incomprehensible at first; Be not discouraged, keep on, there are divine things well envelop'd; I swear to you there are Divine Things more beautiful than words can tell." _Walt Whitman._ I In the long and painful history of man's more or less total failure to value and to honour woman for her greatest, her most vital and self-sacrificing part in human affairs, none has approached in obliquity his recent deplorable blunder of awarding her the suffrage and the right to sit in Parliament, as recognition of her War-services. All the long ages of Mother-surrender, of quiet heroism and attainment, all the best, beautiful years of women's lives which the burden and sickness, the weariness, danger and anguish have devoured down the centuries, while the mothers were giving themselves to be the nation's bone and blood and brain, to nourish, cherish, and upbring it--All were passed over without word or sign. Not for her long ages of devoted duty to the nation's sick and helpless, for rearing and safeguarding its priceless infant and child-life, for administering its homes--fashioning, cleansing, beautifying, contriving, making the utmost of its means and ends--Not for her inestimable services as man's good comrade and wise counseller, his love and friend and faithful help, in sorrow, evil and adversity; not even for her age-long, arduous labours and achievements in Religion, Charity, Reform. For none of these, her great intrinsic and eternal ministries to Life and to Humanity, has man now set her by him in the Van of Things. But for filling shells and felling trees, for turning lathes and driving motors, ploughing fields and lighting street-lamps--all valuable duties, it is true, in the crisis we have passed through, and indispensable to carrying on the nation's business. Yet what a drop from the supreme and tender to the trite and banal, from the vital and essential to the merely incidental, is seen in this belated recompense.