l happy family life
and innocent home love and joy.

Let me quote here, in conclusion, a little poem, called "The Golden
Ladder," which seems to me to embody some of the teaching of this
exquisite page of the illuminated Word of Creation, which man has so
blotted and defiled with his obscenities, but which to "open hearts and
love-lit eyes" is the spring of all that is highest--the birth of the
moral and the cradle of the divine.

"When torn with Passion's insecure delights,
By Love's dear torments, ceaseless changes worn,
As my swift sphere full twenty days and nights
Did make, ere one slow morn and eve were born;

"I passed within the dim, sweet world of flowers,
Where only harmless lights, not hearts, are broken,
And weep out the sweet-watered summer showers--
World of white joys, cool dews, and peace unspoken;

"I started, even there among the flowers,
To find the tokens mute of what I fled--
Passions, and forces, and resistless powers,
That have uptorn the world and stirred the dead.

"In secret bowers of amethyst and rose,
Close wrapped in fragrant golden curtains laid,
Where silver lattices to morn unclose,
The fairy lover clasps his flower-maid.

"Ye blessed children of the jocund day!
What mean these mysteries of love and birth?
Caught up like solemn words by babes at play,
Who know not what they babble in their mirth.

"Or of one stuff has some Hand made us all,
Baptized us all in one great sequent plan,
Where deep to ever vaster deep may call,
And all their large expression find in Man?

"Flowers climb to birds, and birds and beasts to Man,
And Man to God, by some strong instinct driven;
And so the golden ladder upward ran,
Its foot among the flowers, its top in heaven.

"All lives Man lives; of matter first then tends
To plants, an animal next unconscious, dim,
A man, a spirit last, the cycle ends,--
Thus all creation weds with God in him.

"And if he fall, a world in him doth fall,
All things decline to lower uses; while
The golden chain that bound the each to all
Falls broken in the dust, a linkless pile.

"And Love's fair sacraments and mystic rite
In Nature, which their consummation find,
In wedded hearts, and union infinite
With the Divine, of married mind with mind,

Foul symbols