of duty, but the tie of monopolising attachment towards brethren or sisters, or father or mother, or children or lands, for a high motive of conscience, will (though danger of mistaken motives is great, and many first shall be last) reach a transcendent life. In Luke (xiv. 26) the same thought is expressed in slightly varied form. Among the ties to be ignored, in addition to those named in Matthew, are those of one's wife and of one's own soul. As the argument is clear that the soul that is a hindrance must be the selfish soul, so we may find it intelligible that a retardatory wife may have to be an outcast from the shrine of one's dearest work; while inasmuch as the true soul is really one with the highest aspirations and labours of man, so too the true wife is no exile from them, but is one with them in sympathy. But the man who is little but animal knows as little of this higher wifehood, as he knows of that truer soul which in order to live in proximity to its standard has oft to sacrifice the lower ranges of itself.

The essential idea of a hermaphrodite manifests a consciousness of the tradition of the nature of man; the word implies a union of Hermes and Aphrodite, or the conjoinment into one of the representatives of wisdom and of love. But the legend which has overgrown the idea is merely pagan. Whereas to bring down the angelic sphere whole and unbroken into a lower and corporeal plane is an impossibility, and the sphere is sundered into wandering halves, so also to attempt to realise the idea even in artistic physical form produces inversion rather than beauty; and the physical hermaphrodite is more imperfect by far than the ordinary mortal. From what impatience, weakness, or sin monstrosities of birth result,

is a question belonging to disease, not to the healthful ideal that we are contemplating. The EgyptoGreek notion of a bi-sexual heroic personage may be regarded as the result of an inquisitive half-discovery of a deep truth; and the dual titles Herm-Athena, HermAnubis, Herm-Eros, Herm-Heracles, Hermo-Pan, are evidences of an idea that divine personages are more comprehensive and compound than terrestrial man.

new

It will perhaps be a thought to some that between the sexes there is a more real diversity in mind than difference in body. There are exceptional anomalies, masculine women and unmanly men; but the normal mental faculties of men and women work in an entirely diverse manner, woman being led by an inner feeling, an emotion, an intuition, a ruling love; man's nature being rather led slowly toward such feelings than instantaneously responding to them. Woman's perception attains its object like a flash, man's estimate like a march. The one may claim to travel so rapidly that time is altogether distanced, the other may claim to find foothold ever on solid ground. The thought of the one may complete itself in logic, that of the other more frequently begins in it. One is the more suggestive, the other the more comprehensive. both are regarded by physiologists as having the same organs, the differences being rather in variation of development than essentially or in kind. The differences are really less than is conventionally supposed. To take the lacteal apparatus, for instance, every man has it, imperishable through the ages, in rudimentary form. It may be called uncommon, but it is by no means unknown, for milk to be secreted by young men ; there are instances of men physi

But

cally strong and perfect, being able to act as wet nurse.

There are even stranger things which appear to be not so much strictly abnormal as they may seem absurd. There are records of many rude tribes not unlike the following:-" Among the Caribs, the father, on the birth of a child, took to his hammock, and placed himself in the hands of the doctor, the mother meanwhile going about her work as usual." Among the Basques, in some of the valleys, "the women rise immediately after child-birth, and attend to the duties of the household, while the husband goes to bed, taking the baby with him, and thus receives the neighbours' compliments."

In a part of Brazil it has been observed that before the birth of a child both father and mother refrain from flesh, and live chiefly on fish and fruits. In Guiana a similar abstinence has been observed in the man. In Kamskatka, Greenland, and many other primitive regions, for some time before the birth of an infant, the husband must do no hard work. We dare not dogmatise, nay, can scarcely make any suggestion, upon the savage customs referred

to;

they may be the relics of some ancient ceremony of which the very purpose is forgotten; they seem, indeed, inversions to us; but we ought not to be too sure that in simpler races there may not be such unconscious physical sympathy between parents during such a period, that the one can in part bear the burden of the other, in the same manner as the more deficient in vitality of two persons intimately associated frequently absorbs from the other. Whilst writing this paper we have learned that it is by no means unknown, even in this country, for the "morning sickness" which is a symptom of pregnancy, to be shared

by, or even transferred to, the husband. This is participation indeed, and may help us to realise the possibility of a higher and more complete, and we may add, a more happy, sympathetic oneness.

What was the original object of, or what will be represented by, the now generally rudimentary breasts of man, when the external form is cast aside and he is truly himself, it is not necessary here to discuss, but they may mark something in the completion of the double nature; the current belief that the head represents mind, and the breast and heart the region of love and feeling, may be advanced into some truth that for us must still be obscure. When we shall have put on the wedding garment of spiritual love, we know not what things may not be disclosed; or what more we may not learn of God, from whom, as by the parting of an umbilical cord, we are perhaps now, to a certain extent, divided. This severance taking place on our passage into the state which sages have regarded as partial exile, because of the partial falsity of material existence being a hindrance to the purity of vision; this partial falsity, however, being the kindly cloak that hides us sometimes even from the too painful reality of ourselves, covering us up for the sake of our growth out of imperfections.

A great difficulty is to realise that there are truths which may be appreciated more or less and variably by the higher nature, and cannot be brought into the range of the practical or wholly on to the working ground of every-day life. Poetry affords a sphere in which the spirit can refresh itself and yet return to the necessary details and circumstances of ordinary life. But upon our healthy appreciation of this improvable mundane state would be apt to come paralysis were

CHAPTER IX.

A WOOING HALF UNDONE.

THE prouder a woman is the

more bitter is it not to be able to give herself wholly to a man whom she really loves.

The most highly educated, and most self-sustained woman is the most capable of the absolute humility of true feminine love. How can it be otherwise? She is more highly developed than the uneducated woman; her sensibilities are keener. She realises with an exquisiteness of delight her inevitable subjection to the power of masculine love. She the more delicately enjoys the surrender of her independence because she really has an independence of mind and soul to surrender. And Ernestine, in the midst of her defiance, and notwithstanding that this very subject was the one

on

which she could be the most readily aroused, felt that she was wrong. She was experiencing the development of the irresistible womanly yearning to yield up her separate life, her separate responsibilities, and behold them merge into another and a stronger life.

But unfortunately all this surrender with a woman like Ernestine cannot be accomplished with a kiss and a vow. She must

be won at all points; and to-night she felt as if some of the wooing was undone again-although she sighed to herself with a half regret as she thought that there was some which never could be undone. Nothing could restore her to the state before she was in love!

Yet it went hardly with her proud soul to feel that she could not give herself wholly-that she must draw herself back and assert herself. It went hard with her to even fancy her lover less wise than herself upon any point-less enlightened, less open-minded in anything! Her assertion of herself stabbed his prejudices-but the fact that he had prejudices wounded her deeply.

Ernestine had always been more or less solitary. She had been, possibly, too extreme in some of her ways and views for most people; and she had learned to maintain existence without much sympathy. But now that the gate of her heart had indeed been touched it craved to open itself fully-to expand and admit-well, Ernestine, who looked so unbending, was a sufficiently foolish woman to whisper to herself in the recesses of her soul-a master. But the gate could not open thus, howsoever it might desire, to any who was not monarch of mind as well as soul at all points.

And so Ernestine, after mounting the Hill Difficulty, thinking to have left prejudice behind, was at the top met by it full in the face. And met by it, too, more bitterly than she had dreamed of: not among outsiders and people who might matter little to her, but in the person of one to whose judgment she desired to yield her own. It was no use blinding herself to that last fact; instinct and her woman's nature did make her desire, for the first time in her life, to give up her own will.

But it could not be. The man shewed his weakness-he let her

see that in some things he did not exert himself to judge, but gave way to the fashion of the world he lived in. This to Ernestine's active mind was weakness-she could not be utterly won while she saw him thus, and therefore she could not yield her will. Had she felt, however blindly, that he stood on a higher platform than she, her new and even yet despised power of surrender would have silenced her

brain.

She stayed awhile with Dorothy after the others had gone. Coventry was away on another of his wild excursions, and Dorothy, who was always anxious on these occasions as the night closed in, made up the drawing-room fire and prepared herself to wait for him. Ernestine had fetched her wraps and was ready to go, but Dorothy had beguiled her into a talk by the fireside.

"Ernestine," she said, halflaughing and half in earnest, "Dr. Doldy's house has a fascination for me now I am at liberty to picture you presiding over it. I always look up at the windows as I pass, and try to fancy you behind them. Tell me now, do you really expect to subside into a quiet and uneventful married life, playing hostess and ordering dinners:"

"Do you find married life so quiet and uneventful?" was Ernestine's reply.

"Why, no,' said Dorothy, shrugging her shoulders, "but then we are such arrant Bohemians. There is always a certain excitement in living from hand to mouth as we unfortunate literary people are compelled to do."

"Come," said Ernestine, smiling, "you may amuse yourselves with the misfortunes of life, but they are not the sources of your real excitements?"

"Well, I don't want to discourage you, Ernestine, for this marriage is just what I wished would come about; you must forgive me if my imagination, which, by the exigencies of literature, is kept in a sort of red-hot state, persists in trying to give me pictures of your future. It will be a delightful one with two such charming people to mould it-but really, you will have to do something with those curls," she said, putting back the soft locks that fell so thickly on Ernestine's forehead. Ernestine laughed.

"I don't think they will be my greatest difficulty in playing the quiet matron."

"The quiet matron !-imagine it! No, Ernestine, it will take a good many years of something severer than a union with Dr. Doldy to produce that appearance in you. Ah! there is Coventry!"

Dorothy was away out of the drawing-room and down in the hall, like a flash of lightning, and Ernestine, as she put on her shawl, smiled gravely to herself at Dorothy's talk about the quietude and uneventfulness of married life.

"Don't go, Ernestine," cried Dorothy, coming back into the drawing-room; "you must me turn out his pockets-that's

see