Well, then, much so with the flowers of the two hands and feet.  We do homage to those ungathered, and reserve our supremacy; the gathered, no longer courted, are the test of men.  When the embraced woman breathes respect into us, she wings a beast.  We have from her the poetry of the tasted life; excelling any garden-gate or threshold lyrics called forth by purest early bloom.  Respect for her person, for her bearing, for her character that is in the sum a beauty plastic to the civilized young man’s needs and cravings, as queenly physical loveliness has never so fully been to him along the walks of life, and as ideal worships cannot be for our nerving contentment.  She brings us to the union of body and soul; as good as to say, earth and heaven.  Secret of all human aspirations, the ripeness of the creeds, is there; and the passion for the woman desired has no poetry equalling that of the embraced respected woman.

Something of this went reeling through Fleetwood; positively to this end; accompanied the while with flashes of Carinthia, her figure across the varied scenes.  Ridicule vanished.  Could it ever have existed?  If London had witnessed the scene down in Wales, London never again would laugh at the Whitechapel Countess.

He laughed amicably at himself for the citizen sobriety of these views, on the part of a nobleman whose airy pleasure it had been to flout your sober citizens, with their toad-at-the-hop notions, their walled conceptions, their drab propriety; and felt a petted familiar within him dub all pulpitizing, poetizing drivellers with one of those detested titles, invented by the English as a corrective of their maladies or the excesses of their higher moods.  But, reflection telling him that he had done injury to Carinthia—­had inflicted the sorest of the wounds a young woman a new bride can endure, he nodded acquiescence to the charge of misbehaviour, and muzzled the cynic.

As a consequence, the truisms flooded him and he lost his guard against our native prosiness.  Must we be prosy if we are profoundly, uncynically sincere?  Do but listen to the stuff we are maundering!  Extracts of poetry, if one could hit upon the right, would serve for a relief and a lift when we are in this ditch of the serious vein.  Gower Woodseer would have any number handy to spout.  Or Felter:—­your convinced and fervent Catholic has quotations of images and Latin hymns to his Madonna or one of his Catherines, by the dozen, to suit an enthusiastic fit of the worship of some fair woman, and elude the prosy in commending her.  Feltre is enviable there.  As he says, it is natural to worship, and only the Catholics can prostrate themselves with dignity.  That is matter for thought.  Stir us to the depths, it will be found that we are poor soupy stuff.  For estimable language, and the preservation of self-respect in prostration, we want ritual, ceremonial elevation of the visible object for the soul’s adoring through the eye.  So may we escape our foul or empty selves.