For in truth there is the divine eternal feminine counterpart to the divine eternal male, and both are needed to explain the mystery of the dual spirit within us--the mystery of the two in one, so infinitely stranger and more wonderful than that triune life which the blind teachers of the blind have made a rock of stumbling and offence out of a truth clear and obvious as noon. We speak of Mother Nature, but we do not discern the living truth behind our words. How few of us have the vision of this great brooding Mother, whose garment is the earth and sea, whose head is pillowed among the stars: she, who, with death and sleep as her familiar shapes, soothes and rests all the weariness of the world, from the waning leaf to the beating pulse, from the brief span of a human heart to the furrowing of granite brows by the uninterrupted sun, the hounds of rain and wind, and the untrammelled airs of heaven. 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 shadow, now, were those 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.