body, the mind, the soul. Song keeps the spirit of youth alive. He who sings, whether in heart or in voice, constantly, has learned the secret of perpetual youth. He needs to go to no mythical spring to keep young. New life wells up within him. His eye remains bright, his brow and cheeks free from the furrows of care, his lips a rosy red, his brain alert, his body responsive and radiant, his presence magnetic, his appetite and digestion good, his nerves under control, his spirit serene, his temper unruffled, his life joyous and blessed. For he has learned the lesson of joy-he goes Singing through Life with God.

CHAPTER XI

THE SONGS OF HAPPY LOVERS

"All the world loves a lover"

LOVE is the motive power of all creation. God must have loved the thought of the Universe or He would not have created it. It is inconceivable that so wonderful, marvelous, beautiful, varied, and comprehensive a world as our own tiny planet could have been the product of anything but love. We are compelled to believe all creation has a similar origin. Hence the conclusion, as expressed in the last line of Ina Coolbrith's graphic Meadow Larks:

For life is love, the world is love, and Love is over all! Every flower that grows is the outcome of love. Indeed, to perpetuate its kind seems to be the chief object of every living creature, and love is the divinely ordered means for attaining that end. The loves of the flowers are very interesting to witness, and who is there, with a pure heart and clean mind, who does not enjoy watching the love affairs of the doves and all the birds. I was in an office in the busiest street of Los Angeles some months ago. The window was wide open, looking down upon the bustle, hurry, confusion, noise and stir common to city

streets. Outside the window was a fire escape landing, and on this, daily, my friend used to throw out seeds and other food for the birds. As we sat talking, a quiet, gray linnet came and began to feed. Almost immediately there flew down near her a red-headed, bright chested male, and in the most fervent, exuberant, passionate song I have ever heard from a bird throat, poured out his whole heart to the bird of his choice. Everyone in the room stopped his activities, stirred deeply by the glorious beauty of the song. For a time it seemed as if his suit would be successful, then, suddenly, his (and our) hopes were dashed to the ground-temporarily at least by the unconcerned flying away of the female. The result upon the singer was tremendous. Disheartened surprise, keen disappointment, rude awakening to the fact that his attentions were unwelcome, never were registered more clearly by human. or bird before. His crest fell, his tail lost its perk, his whole demeanor was one of dejection. I have always hoped. that, later, he won his suit, or gained a mate worthy his beauty, the charm of his song, and his decidedly passionate avowal.

Fabre, in his wonderful books on the insects, has told us marvelous stories of the loves of his pets, and Maeterlinck's "Love Flight of the Bee" is one of the classics of the literature of all time. In the books of all peoples and all ages the loves of animals and man are beautifully recorded, and more poems,

pictures, dramas, buildings and other stupendous works of men have been inspired by love than any other motive. Half the poems and novels written have love of some form as their theme. This I believe is as it should be, yet it must be confessed that many love songs are futile, inadequate, incomplete, unsatisfactory, and the love affairs themselves terminate in the same way. This ought not to be, but I must believe that the failure arises from the fact that most people have not learned to sing their love songs aright, rather than that love itself is a failure. I would not pose here as a teacher, as an instructor, but I do know somewhat, by experience and observation, of the kind of song happy and satisfied lovers sing. And further, I know, positively, that if others would sing in the same strain and key they would avoid the rocks and shoals upon which the love barques of so many are wrecked.

One might fill this volume with quotations from literature of the wonderful loves of past agesBeatrice and Dante, Héloïse and Abélard, Helen and Leander, and in the beginning of our own time the love and devotion of Gladstone and his wife, and of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett will recur to all. It is not everyone who could think, live, or write the "Sonnets from the Portuguese," or have a lover able to respond with such poems as "My Star," and "O Lyric Love." Think of being able

to write and live this poem of hers, and then see his responses:

This very love which is my boast,

And which, when rising up from breast to brow,

Doth crown me with a ruby large enow

To draw men's eyes and prove the inner cost,
This love even, all my worth, to the uttermost,

I should not love withal, unless that thou

Hadst set me an example, shown me how,

When first thine earnest eyes with mine were crossed, And love called love. And thus, I cannot speak

Of love even, as a good thing of my own.

Thy soul hath snatched up mine all faint and weak
And placed it by thee on a golden throne,-
And that I love, (O soul, we must be meek!)
Is by thee only, whom I love alone.

I do not know whether Browning referred to his wife in "My Star," but she was so reserved, shy, and personally unknown to the world that it is not at all unlikely:

All that I know

Of a certain star

Is, it can throw

(Like the angled spar)

Now a dart of red,

Now a dart of blue;

Till my friends have said

They would fain see, too,

My star that dartles the red and the blue!

Then it stops like a bird; like a flower, hangs furled:

They must solace themselves with the Saturn above it. What matter to me if their star is a world?

Mine has opened its soul to me; therefore I love it. In his apostrophe to her in "The Ring and the Book," which begins "O Lyric Love," he asserts that