And so they went together one green way Till April dying made free the world for May; And on his guide suddenly Love's face turned, And in his blind eyes burned Hard light and heat of laughter; and like flame That opens in a mountain's ravening mouth To blear and sear the sunlight from the south, His mute mouth opened, and his first word came; "Knowest thou me now by name?" And all his stature waxed immeasurable, As of one shadowing heaven and lightening hell; And statelier stood he than a tower that stands And darkens with its darkness far-off sands Whereon the sky leans red; And with a voice that stilled the winds he said: "I am he that was thy lord before thy birth, I am he that is thy lord till thou turn earth; I make the night more dark, and all the morrow Dark as the night whose darkness was my breath: O fool, my name is sorrow; Thou fool, my name is death." By the term "darkness" in the third line from the end of the above quotation, we must understand the darkness and mystery out of which man comes into this world, and comes only to die. This monstrous symbolism may need some explanation, before you see how very fine the meaning is. Love, that is the attraction of sex to sex, with all its emotions, heroisms, sacrifices, and nobilities, cannot be understood by the young. To them, love is only the physical and the moral charm of the being that is loved. In man the passion of love becomes noble and specialised by the development in him of moral, æsthetic, and other feelings that are purely human. But the attraction of sex, that is behind all this, is a universal and terrible fact, a tremendous mystery, whose ultimate nature no man knows or ever will know. Why? Because if we knew the nature and origin of the forces that create, we could understand the whole universe, and ourselves, and everything that men now call mystery. But all that we certainly do know is this, that we come into the world out of mystery and go out of the world again back into mystery, and that no mortal man can explain the Whence, the Why, or the Whither. The first sensations of love for another being are perhaps the most delicious feelings known to men; the person loved seems for the time to be more beautiful and good than any one else in the world. This is what the poet means by describing the first appearance of love as a beautiful, tender child, innocent and dumb. But later in life the physical illusion passes away; then one learns the relation of this seeming romance to the awful questions of life and death. The girl beloved becomes the wife; then she becomes the mother; but in becoming a mother, she enters into the very shadow of death, sometimes never to return from it. Birth itself is an agony, the greatest agony that humanity has to bear. We come into the world through pains of the most deadly kind, and leave the world later on in pain; and what all this means, we do not know.