LOVE'S TROUBLES

We are all born for love. The strangest thing about it is however, that while love is the one eternal and transcendent passion, there is none less sympathized with by others in cases where its existence does not conform to every custom and convention sanctioned by time and tradition.

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-Johnson.

HAKESPEARE was by no means the less Shakespeare when he reckoned Love's troubles among the crowning ills that “make calamity" of earthly life. Even at its best estate its encounter with time is calamitous enough to warrant the poets in all the mournful strains they have given to "Love in such a wilderness as this." It is not in the tragedies and suicides that find their way into the daily papers of all nations that the ruinous work of love in blind human pathways is greatest. In hearts that never betray a sign of this anguish to the world its wounds are deadliest and in the simple fact that the course of true love never does run smooth lies a depth of universal sorrow and loss that ought to find some mitigation if love is to retain any foothold on our troubled earth. Indeed long ago one stuIdent of the case declared that "All the evils we know on earth, find in the violence done to love their full and legitimate birth."

Unless one is to hold with Hardy, that man is in the toils of some malicious power bent on causing suffering, it is impossible to believe that so divine a spirit as love was sent on earth to work such havoc in human hearts and lives. It was a risky business no doubt to let Love follow man out of Eden into a world of thorns and thistles and that com

mercialism which is now found to be the original sin. Yet there seems to be no sufficient reason for fortune, even in such a world, to prove "an unrelenting foe to Love" if man could put some right estimate upon life itself. That "Love is life's fine centre and includes heart and mind" is a truth that more than poets recognize, yet it is in a mad chase for what they call life that Love is lost to a majority of mankind. By this blindness all manner of counterfeits for love are caught up to meet the passing needs or ideas of a conventional life and society and thus the fulness of life which is ever in love is comparatively unknown to the race. Meantime the haunting dream of it, or perchance some unauthorized acquaintance with it, fills with pathetic yearning and unrest the souls of hapless mortals. In the beginning it was not so, as the Good Book itself declares, but because of the hardness of men's hearts all this abuse of life and love came about. Worse still it has come to be accepted so complacently as a part of man's make-up that one of the greatest of the matchless French writers presents his hero in the toils of two or three imperfect loves and at the end declares he "was a great sinner" but, in big capitals, "A MAN." If nature's verdict "This was a man" is the one in point, as Shakespeare made it, sinners against Love could hardly merit it, since there great nature allows no shuffling. To be true to the one Love of his heart and soul despite all time or fortune can bring against it, is the victory over life and death she imperatively demands. Graciously, too, she has marked out the way for man to know the true Love from the false. There are women, said John J. Ingalls, whom to love makes it impossible ever to love another. What surer remedy could be devised for the fickle and imperfect loves that leave man still hungering for another. "Whoever has loved twice has never loved at all. A man may have two passions,

never two loves," wrote Alexander Duman, recognizing as Ingalls did nature's provision in the case. To be sure one sorry cynic observes that "every man seeks his ideal woman, but heaven only knows when he finds her-he never does." That, however, is a gross libel upon the race. Every man and every woman knows it full well when the true all-satisfying love takes possession of the soul and if every child of earth would wait for that assurance though there might be fewer marriages there would be an end to the false and wretched ones which hold man back from all the Eden joy and glory designed for him. But meantime such dire calamities attend the thing called love in the path of marrying mortals that they might be tempted to imitate the distracted nations that in the face of loud pretensions to brotherly love were but yesterday found declaring in the fiery blasts of war "enough of that kind of love, let us try hatred instead." At least hatred carries an open front and men may face it or turn their backs on it as they choose. who can honorably escape from the evils of unhappy loves that have entangled them in their social, perchance legal, meshes? Above all who can measure the wreck of joy and power they effect in that fine seat and centre of life where love resides? The proud silence in which the victims of love's wounds hide their pains and losses, renders this evil more dark and deadly than any other in human pathways. The woman who recently declared, in a prize essay, that of all the achievements of her life she was proudest of the living lie that enabled her to turn a smiling front to family and society while enduring a loathsome hell with a husband who loved and supported another woman, supposedly unknown to her, unearthed a condition in human affairs that tells what beastly wrongs, crosses and concealments in love may cover. Jacob serving seven years for Rachel only to have

But

Leah imposed upon him for family reasons and the custom of a country is a patriarchal lunacy not unknown to our own times. But recently comes a story of a selfish mother who pledged a son of eighteen not to marry while any of the family relatives had need of him, and it was not until he was in his seventy-eighth year that the last of those relatives graciously died and freed him for old age's chance in the rosy realm of love. Not infrequently some departing husband or wife will take steps to prevent any future unions in the one left behind, although admitting by this very act the pitiful failure of their own. Let the foresworn chance of the ideal love and wedded life cross the path of such a darkly bound victim, and the height of earthly woe and martyrdom is reached. Nothing in all the range of time can work such misery in human lives as this same love which was no doubt meant to bring the quintessence of joy to all lives. Fortunately, too, it is not left without witnesses to its supreme worth in the right hands. There are homes of spotless purity, infinite peace, where heaven tunes the harp of life to such love "as spirits feel in worlds whose course is equable and pure" and the gates of Eden open to man as when time began.

"Love is the only good in the world," says Browning, and clearly it is the only Good upon which the ideal home that is the hope of the world can be founded. Further still it is the only Good that carries its own assurance of the eternal home where all is love. Whoever has truly loved knows that the wondrous life he has entered into is endless-is one with the life of God.

He who would find life therefore must find love, for he who misses Love has scarcely crossed the threshold of that sacred temple of Life whose dome pierces "the white radiance of eternity."

MARRIAGE AS A DUTY

HAT life for men of these momentous days "consists

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entirely of duties" is a proposition that might reach beyond the stern Briton by whom it was propounded. But when it comes to reckoning marriage among those duties, it is not strange that some men, like the lad who was told that it was his duty to love a disagreeable neighbor, wish that they could be got in duty free. Of all things that elude the intermeddlers, pious or impious offices, this matter of taking a partner for life is the supreme one. Marriage may go by destiny, as the great Bard claims, but need and expediency strike chill notes in the case till manifest destiny shows itself on some higher plane.

"Hail wedded love! Mysterious law, true source of human offspring," wrote England's poet of the golden lyre and the nation that gave Milton to the world may well be confounded at the idea of marrying to replenish the race numerically. Considering what hasty and hap-hazard marriages have done for the race it seems the climax of folly to look for any benefit along such lines. Indeed all the long struggle of mankind to reach the heights looks to the ideal marriage, the "marriage of true minds" for its realization.

To lower the standard of marriage would be about the last calamity war's aftermath could bring upon the World. Not very much farther would it have to go in the backward path to make the forcible seizure of wives and the fate of

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