and in the very numerous poems in various languages which have more or less obscurely dealt with the rose as the emblem of the feminine pudenda there are occasional references to the stream which guards or presides over the rose.  It may, indeed, be recalled that even in the name nymphae anatomists commonly apply to the labia minora there is generally believed to be a poetic allusion to the Nymphs who presided over streams, since the labia minora exert an influence on the direction of the urinary stream.

In Wilhelm Meister (Part I, Chapter XV), Goethe, on the basis of his own personal experiences, describes his hero’s emotions in the humble surroundings of Marianne’s little room as compared with the stateliness and order of his own home.  “It seemed to him when he had here to remove her stays in order to reach the harpsichord, there to lay her skirt on the bed before he could seat himself, when she herself with unembarrassed frankness would make no attempt to conceal from him many natural acts which people are accustomed to hide from others out of decency—­it seemed to him, I say, that he became bound to her by invisible bands.”  We are told of Wordsworth (Findlay’s Recollections of De Quincey, p. 36) that he read Wilhelm Meister till “he came to the scene where the hero, in his mistress’s bedroom, becomes sentimental over her dirty towels, etc., which struck him with such disgust that he flung the book out of his hand, would never look at it again, and declared that surely no English lady would ever read such a work.”  I have, however, heard a woman of high intellectual distinction refer to the peculiar truth and beauty of this very passage.

In one of his latest novels, Les Rencontres de M. de Breot, Henri de Regnier, one of the most notable of recent French novelists, narrates an episode bearing on the matter before us.  A personage of the story is sitting for a moment in a dark grotto during a night fete in a nobleman’s park, when two ladies enter and laughingly proceed to raise their garments and accomplish a natural necessity.  The man in the background, suddenly overcome by a sexual impulse, starts forward; one lady runs away, the other, whom he detains, offers little resistance to his advances.  To M. de Breot, whom he shortly after encounters, he exclaims, abashed at his own actions:  “Why did I not flee?  But could I imagine that the spectacle of so disgusting a function would have any other effect than to give me a humble opinion of human nature?” M. de Breot, however, in proceeding to reproach his interlocutor for his inconsiderate temerity, observes:  “What you tell me, sir, does not entirely surprise me.  Nature has placed very various instincts within us, and the impulse that led you to what you have just now done is not so peculiar as you think.  One may be a very estimable man and yet love women even in what is lowliest in their bodies.”