HAVING in the foregoing lectures considered the nature of] the soul, its nurture amidst the

protecting and fostering in Huences of Home; and, in a general way, the tuition it owes to the
five sources, of Instinct; of Condition; of Persons; of Books; and of Facts; — I proceed to the
enumeration and inspection, ac
51
And hums the balmy air to still
The balance of delight.
Yet where love nestles, thou canst teach
The soul to love thee more; Hearts also shall thy lessons reach
That never loved before. Stript is the haughty one of pride
The bashful freed from fear While rising like the ocean tide
In flows the joyous year.2
These gay physical influences are celebrated by an old poet three centuries ago:
cording to our skill, of the pupil's own activity and cooperation in his growth with God and
nature.
I come now with a mingled feeling of diffidence and joy to describe the great enchantment of
life, which, like a certain divine rage and enthusiasm, seizes on man at one period, and works a
revolution in his soul and body, unites him to his race, pledges him to the domestic and civic
relation, carries him with new sympathy into nature; enhances the power of the senses; gives him
new eyes, and new ears, - so much does it exalt the force of the old; awakens new and finer
susceptibilities to poetry, music, art; adds to his character the heroic and even the sacred
attributes; establishes marriage; and gives permanence to human society; and then at last proves
only introductory to more expensive and divine affection.
The power of Love is indeed the great poem of nature which all brute matter does seem to
predict from the affinities of chemistry - and of crystals, upward. The dualism which in human
nature makes sex, in inorganic matter strives and works in polarity, showing itself in elective
affinities, in explosion, in flame, in new products. In the vegetable kingdom it solemnizes in the
spring time the marriage of the plants, with the splendid bridal apparel of those sons and
daughters of beauty, in whose sibylline leaves we read the approach of man. At the same season
all the senses apprise us of a stimulated life and wide jubilee throughout the inferior creation.
Suddenly birds arrive and the silent woods tingle and swell with melody. In spring new life
appears brisk and jocund in the animal tribes.
In the temperate zones, since immemorial time, men have celebrated these welcome changes on
the morning of May. One of Wordsworth's latest lays is dedicated to the May day:
May makes the cheerful sure; May breeds
and brings new blood May marcheth throughout every limb; May
makes the merry mood.
Allpes.
This seems pardonable and a good-natured condescension in the poets to attribute the gay
influences of the forest and field to cold and even tempered man who sees surely in these that
which symbolizes his own life and affections, but whose own life is not annual but eternal and
whose affections are not bound by laws so humble and brute. In the polar winter his flames glow
as genially as in the Italian spring; his heart, the citizen of every country and the lover of every
month, can tinge the snowdrifts and glaciers with rosy light, and warm the alpine cabins of New
Hampshire and the cellars of the Fins and Laps with tenderness and personal truth as readily as
the mansions of England and the sunny pastures of Spain.
And yet the natural association of the sentiment of Love with de heyday of the blood leads me to
say that in order to describe It in vivid tints which every youth and maid should confess to be
their throbbing experience, one must not be too old. The vus images of youth reject the least
savor of a mature phi ry, as chilling with age and pedantry their purple bloom. And - Ode,
composed on Mow Morning" lines 9-16, 49-56 (misquoted). The
the
All nature welcomes her whose sway
Tempers the year's extremes, Who scattereth lustres o'er noonday
Like morning's dewy gleams While mellow warble, sprightly trill,
The tremulous heart excite
delicious images of youth re
losoph
un.
and place. There du
label
on
therefore I know well, I incur the risk of criticism of being necessarily hard and stoical from
those whom I would willin persuade to ennoble their affections. But from these formidable
censors I shall appeal to my seniors. For it is to be considered the other side, that this passion of
which we speak, though it has gin with the young, yet forsakes not the old, or rather suffers m
one who is truly its servant to grow old, but makes the aged in anticipation of it, not less than the
tender maiden, though in a dif. ferent and nobler sort.
For it is a fire that kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a
wandering spark out of another private heart, does glow and enlarge until it warms and beams
upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal Heart of All, and so lights up the whole
world and all nature with its generous flames. It matters not therefore whether we attempt to
describe the passion at twenty, thirty, or eighty years; he who paints it at the first period will miss
some of its later, he who paints it at the last some of its earlier traits. Only it is to be hoped that
by patience and the Muses' aid, we may attain to that inward view of the law which shall
describe a truth ever young, ever beautiful, so central that it shall commend itself to the eye at
whatever angle beholden.
And the first condition is that we must leave a too close and lingering adherence to the actual, to
facts, and seek to study this sentiment in its ideal manifestation. For it is the nature of man that
each man always sees his own life defaced and disfigured as the life of man is not to his
imagination. If you will forgive the expression every man sees over all his own experience a
certain slime of error whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal. Let any man go back to those
delicious relations which make the beauty of his life, which have given him sincerest instruction
and nourishment, he will shrink and shrink. Alas I know not why, but infinite compunctions
embitter in mature life all the recollections of budding sentiment and cover every beloved name.
Everything is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or, as truth. But all is sour if seen as
experience in nature. Details are always melancholy. The plan is seemly and noble. It is strange
how painful is the actual world, the painful kingdom of time
54
are There dwells care and canker and fear. With thought, The ideal, is immortal hilarity; the rose
of joy. Round it, all fuses sing; but with names and persons and the partial in
of today and yesterday is grief.' I hate history; I hate
e and dates. Let them fall, forget the you and me, converse with things as the irresponsible
picture that sails in beauty before your eye and you may deal with all Creation -- things nearest
and coarsest, never naming names, never giving you the glooms of a recent date or relation but
hang there in the heaven of letters unrelated, untimed, a joy and a sign, an autumnal star.
The strong bent of nature is seen in the proportion which this topic of personal relations usurps
in the conversation of society. What do we wish to know of any person so much as how they
have sped in the history of this sentiment? See then the attractiveness of all stories true or false of
which love is the theme. What books in the circulating libraries circulate? How we glow over
these novels when told with any spark of truth and nature! And what fastens the attention in
the intercourse of life like any pas sage betraying affection between two parties? It matters not
how strange they are to us: we never saw them before, and never shall see them again. But we
see them exchange a glance, or betray a deep emotion, and we are no longer strangers to them.
We understand them thoroughly, and take the warmest interest in the development of the
romance. The earliest demonstrations of complacency and kindness are winningest pictures of
nature. In the country and in the middle classes where the manners are freer, this is very prettily
seen in the engaging, half-artful, half-artless ways of school girls who go into the shops to buy a
skein of silk, a sheet of paper, and talk half an hour about nothing with the broad-faced, good-
natured shop boy. In the village they are on a perfect equality which Love delights in, and
without any coquetry the happy, affectionate nature of woman flows out in this pretty gossip.
The girls have little beauty yet plainly do they establish between them and the good boy the most
agreeable,
W, II, 1 yet the natural association ... yesterday is grief" ("Love, 1); "It is strange ... yesterday is
grief" (D, 95).
"... Millage Love D256" [E]. The passage referred to is incorporated ?.", 11, 172-173; it was
written March 8, 1839, after the Boston read
6 "Insert Village Love in "Love," w, II, 172-173; ing of this lecture.
55
sed, they may find, that, several things which were not the
m. have more reality to this groping memory, than the charm
itself which illuminated them.
Passing sweet Are the domains of tender memory.?
confiding relations what with their fun and their earnest abe Edgar and Jonas and Almira and
who was invited and we danced at the dancing school and when the singing school won begin,
and other nothings concerning which the parties coord By and by that boy wants a wife and
very truly and heartily will he know where to find a sincere, sweet mate without any risk such
as Milton deplores as incident to scholars and great men.
In strict philosophy there is a quite infinite distance between our knowledge of our own
existence and the evidence we have for the existence of nature including that of persons. In
Logic the position of the Idealist is inexpugnable who persists in regarding men as appearances
and phantoms merely which represent to him his own ideas in the masquerade of forms like his
own. But when we treat of Human Life and its several departments we must descend from this
high ground of absolute science and converse with things as they appear.
I said in my last lecture somewhat of the part Persons play in the education of us all. I own I
shrink already to think of some disparaging words that fell from me in that connexion in relation
to the imperfect, unsatisfying influence of Persons. For Persons are love's world; and the coldest
philosopher cannot recall the debt of the young soul wandering here in nature to the power of
love, without putting a new value instantly on the social relation and tempting him to unsay as
treasonable to nature aught derogatory to the social instincts. For though the celestial rapture
falling out of heaven seizes only upon those of tender age, and although a beauty overpowering
all analysis or comparison and putting us quite beside ourselves, we can seldom see after thirty,
yet the remembrance of these visions outlasts all other remembrance and is a wreath of flowers
on the oldest brows.
What I am going to say may sound strange, yet I shall say it. It may seem to many men in
revising their experience that they have no fairer page in their life's book than the delicious
memory of some passages when affection contrived to give a witchcraft surpassing even the deep
attraction of its own truth, to a parcel of accidental and insignificant circumstances. In looking
back
Who has ever forgotten the visitations of that Power to his heart and brain which created all
things new; which was the dawn in him of Music, of Poetry, of Art; which made the face of
Nature radiant with purple light; the morning and the night varied enchantments; when a single
tone of one voice could make the heart heat and the most trivial circumstance associated with
one form is put in the amber of memory; when we became all eye when one was present, and all
memory when one was gone; when the vouth becomes a watcher of windows and studious of a
glove, a veil, a ribbon, or the wheels of a carriage; when no place is too solitary and none too
silent for him who has richer company and sweeter conversation in his new thoughts than any
old friends, though best and surest, can give him for the figure, the motions, the words of the
beloved object, even the slightest, are not like other images written as in water but enamelled in
fire and make the study of midnight?
Thou art not gone, being gone; where'er thou art, Thou lov'st in him thy watchful eyes, in him
thy loving heart.
Who but throbs at the recollection of days when happiness was not happy enough but must be
drugged with the relish of pain and fear; for he touched the secret of the matter who said of love,
All other pleasures are not worth his pains:*
when the day was not long enough but the night too must be summed in keen recollections: when
the head boiled all night
7 "'It may seem to ma "To the Same" ["Poems of
* Donne, "Epithalamion," stanza IX P
nay seem to many men ... tender memory" (cf. B, 6); Wordsworth, pamet "Poems of
Sentiment and Reflection," XXVI), lines 50-51.
amion, stanza IX (punctuation supplied).
C
Tanis de St. Evremond,
on the pillow with the generous deed it resolved upon: when moonlight was a pleasing fever, and
the stars were lettera the flowers ciphers, and the air was coined into song: when business
seemed an impertinence and all the men and w running to and fro in the street, mere pictures?
The passion operates a revolution in the youth. It quicken all things, and makes all things
significant. Nature grows conscious. The bird who sung unheeded yesterday on the boughs of the
tree, as the boy whistled by, — himself as gay as the bird sings now to his heart and soul.
Almost the notes are articulate The clouds almost have faces, as he looks on them. The waving
bough of the forest, the undulating grass beneath, and the peeping flowers have grown
sympathetic; and almost he fears to trust them with the secret which they seem to invite.
Yet nature soothes and sympathises. In the green solitude he finds a dearer home than with men.
Fountain heads and pathless groves, Places which pale passion loves, Moonlight walks when all
the fowls Are warmly housed save bats and owls, A midnight bell, a passing groan,
These are the sounds we feed upon." Lo now there in the wood is the fine madman; he is a palace
of sweet sounds and sights. He dilates. He is twice a man; he walks with arms akimbo. He
soliloquizes; he accosts the grass and the trees. He feels the blood of the violet, the clover, and
the butter cup in his veins, 11 and he talks with the brook that wets his foot. The causes that have
sharpened his perceptions to natural beauty have made him love music and verse. It is a fact
often observed that men have written good verses under the inspiration of passion who cannot
write well under any other circumstances. I believe we can never grow quite indifferent to the
sweet elegiac strains that once were the breath of joy and harmony.
English speech if harsh and hissing is full of pathetic and
strains which have worthily celebrated the sorrows and Triumphs of love. There are many
cadences and verses of a
inward power speaking to emotion and not to thought which
the property and creation of this sentiment and which are "item found in the newspapers and
magazines, in corners which
eve fails not to visit, more affecting as it seems to me than whose which by the purer thought
and perfect literary merit do
Hain a classic rank and go down for some ages. The like force ha passion over all the nature of
man; it expands the sentiment. It makes the clown gentle and gives the coward heart. Into the
most fitful and abject breast it will infuse a heart and courage to defy the world so only it have
the countenance of the beloved obiect. In giving him to another it still more gives him to himself.
The lover says — "I am not what I was since I beheld her." He has new perceptions, new and
keener purposes, a religious solemnity of character and aims. He does not longer appertain to his
family and society. He is something. He is a person. He is a soul.
And here let us examine a little nearer the nature of that influence which is thus potent over the
human youth. Let us approach and admire Beauty, whose revelation to man we now celebrate -
Beauty, welcome as the sun wherever it pleases to shine, which pleases everybody with it and
with themselves. 13 (Brandt had weak eyes but it did not hurt them to look into the eyes of
Emma ever so long.) 14
Beauty is ever that divine thing the ancient[s] esteemed it. It is, they said, the flowering of virtue.
15 It would be hard to analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and
Torm. We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency but we cannot find
whereat this dainty emotion, this Wandering gleam point[s]. It is destroyed for the imagination
by any attempt to refer it to the organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or
love that society knows and has, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere,
to re
scholars the ideal circle a the Divine Love avails its soul's recollection of the
lations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness; a true faerie la to what roses and violets hint and
foreshow. We cannot . beauty. Its nature is like opaline dovesneck lustres, hovering an
evanescent, 16
And so it resembles the selectest things we know, which have this rainbow character defying all
attempts at appropria. tion and use. I have never heard anything better said of music than the
saying of Jean Paul: "Away away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I
have found not and shall not find.” 17 And so with every work of the plastic arts. The statue is
then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism and can
no longer be described by one compass and measuring wand but demands an active imagination
to go with it and to say what it is in the act of doing. It is always represented in a transition from
that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone.
And the same remark holds of painting. And of poetry, Landor finely asks, "Whether it is not to
be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence?" 18 So must it be with Beauty. Then
first is it charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story
without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it seems
"too bright and good for human nature's daily food." 19 When it makes the beholder feel his
unworthiness: when he cannot feel his right to it though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more
right than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.
And this agrees well with the high philosophy of beauty which the ancient writers delighted in;
for, they said, that the soul of man embodied here on earth went wandering everywhere to seek
that other world of its own out of which it came into this, but was soon stupefied by the light of
the natural sun, and unable to see any objects but those of this world, which are but shadows
16 "Beauty is ever that divine thing ... and evanescent" (C, 34).
"D, 203; quotation of Jean Paul Richter in Memorials of Mrs. Hemang Henry F. Chorley, 2 vols.
(New York, 1836), I, 231; also in C, 99, and Ency Pedia, 216.
15 Cf. Walter Savage Landor, "Duke de Richelieu, Sir Fire Coats, and Lady Glengrin,"
Imaginary Conversations, [First Series). 3 vols. (vols. I, II, 2nd
l things. And, as geometers are not able to present to their
he ideal circle and solids without the aid of diagrams, so
he Love avails itself of beautiful bodies as aids to the
verollection of the eternally fair and good, and the man be Widing such a person runs to her and
finds the highest joy in con
mulating the form, movement, and intelligence of such an one Woraus it suggests to him the
presence of that which indeed is within the beauty and the cause of the beauty. "But if from too
much conversing with material objects, the soul was gross and sought to find its satisfaction in
the body, it reaped nothing but sorrow, body being unable utterly to fulfil the promise that beauty
holds out; but if, accepting the hint of these visions and suggestions that beauty makes to his
mind, he passes through the body and falls to admire manners and dispositions, and the lovers
converse together and contemplate one another in their discourses and their actions (the Beauty
of the visible body being but an organ of the memory,) then they pass to the true mansion of
beauty, more and more inflame their love of it, and mounted upon the wings of chaste desire
become pure and hallowed; and by conversation with that which is in itself excel lent,
magnanimous, lowly, and just, the lover comes to a warmer love of these celestial traits and a
quicker apprehension of them; so he passes from loving them in one to love them in all and so is
the one beautiful soul only the door through which he enters to the society of all true and pure
souls. So comes he in the particular society of his mate to a clearer sight of any spot, any taint
which her beauty has contracted from this world and is able to point it out and this with mutual
joy that they are now able without of rence to point out blemishes and hindrances in each other
and give each other all help and comfort in curing the same.
And beholding in many souls the traits of the divine Beauty and separating in each soul that
which is divine from the taint which they have contracted in the world the lover ascends ever
to the highest beauty, to the love and knowledge of the Divinity, by steps on this ladder of
created souls.
Somewhat like this thought have all the truly wise told us of Le in all ages. This doctrine is not
old, nor is it new. If Plato, watch, and Apuleius taught it, so have Petrarch, Angelo, and
[London, 1826]; vol. III (London, 1828]), III, 206; cf. B, 45.
19 Cf. Wordsworth, "She was a Phantom of delight," lines 7-8.
60
heart. Man's acute courage and sufficient of order into a trivia
acuteness is prone to degenerate into injustice: his
sufficiency into selfishness. Woman's taste and love into a trivial tyranny; her love into an
unprogressive
jealousy. They must balance a
and nicety of the house
Milton. The soul teaches it in every time, in opposition and rebuke to that subterranean prudence
which talks of marriage with words that take hold of the upper world, whilst one eye is eternally
down cellar, so that its gravest discourse has ever a slight savor of bacon and soap barrels. Base
when the snout of this influence touches the education of young women, and withers the blessed
affection and hope of human nature by teaching that marriage is nothing but housekeeping and
that woman's life has no other aim.20 The soul teaches this doctrine again in rebuke to that worse
deprivation of the libertine. There is no deeper dupe than he. He dreams that he has the sparkle
and the color of the cup and the chaste society of marriage the dregs. They see him in the base
court without a glimpse of the good he desires, mocked by joyless riots, with the hounds and
wolves and snakes of Nemesis close behind him in dread and fatal pursuit 21
Marriage unites the severed halves and joins characters which are complements to each other.
Man represents Intellect whose object is Truth, Woman Love whose object is goodness. Man
loves Reality, woman order; man power, woman grace. Man goes abroad into the world and
works and acquires. Woman stays at home to make the house beautiful. For whilst man
represents the Intellect, whilst man excels in understanding, in woman is always affection and
therein somewhat sacred and oracular and nearer to the Divinity. 22
Woman in very unfriendly condition, very unfriendly to a finer culture, is found the spontaneous
adviser of noble courses. The sentiment which the man thinks he came unto gradually through
the events of years, to his surprise he finds woman dwell ing there in the same as in her natural
home. Each with its powers has corresponding weakness and temptations which find their
fortress in the other. Man mighty in his faculties and resources, impelled ever to action and
experiments, makes experiment of the bad as well as of the good. The woman inclines to virtue.
But woman with her tenderness and finer susceptibility is keenly alive to suffering; tears are
always near her eye; anguish near her
20 "Beauty is ever that divine thing ... no other aim" ("'Love," W, 11, 1
ot be offended at the superfluous, supererogatory order
ety of the housewife. He must bear with little extremities flourishes of a quality that makes
comfort for all the senses
chout his house. He must look at a virtue whole and not v at the skirt of its garment where it
gathers up a little dust.23 Nor let the roughness of man accuse the softness of the wife and blind
him to a grandeur in the same soul, namely, that sensibility which is the costliest of attributes,
which gives the person who hath it, an universal life, and mirrors all nature in her face.
Meantime the woman must not yield to that sweet inaction which has such charms for [her]
kindly nature. The rare women that charm us are those happily constituted persons who take
possession of society wherever they go, and give it its form, its tone. If they sit as we sit to wait
for what shall be said, we shall have no Olympus. To their genius elegance is essential. It is
enough that we men stammer and mince words, and play the clown and pedant alternately; they
must speak as clearly and simply as a song. This is a happiness that kindness and the culture of
what is noble will bestow. Neither will the Graces suffer their daughter in conversation to run on,
as it is called -- a great vice. A fine woman keeps her purpose, and maintains her ground with
integrity of manner whilst you censure or rally her. If she is disconcerted and grieved the game is
up and society a gloom...
But not to expand at present these trite ethics of society, let us inspect a little more narrowly the
progress of the affections and see how friendship is transformed into charity, into an uniVersal
benevolence. In the procession
Olence. In the procession of the soul from within out uit enlarges its circles ever like the pebble
thrown into the the light proceeding from an orb. The rays of the soul
pon things nearest, - upon every utensil and toy; nurses and domestics, upon the house and yard
and Pas sens, upon the circle of acquaintance, upon politics and geog
upon nurses and domestics,
which shall be harm
dren. Danger, sorrow, and
prays. It make
ale
raphy and history. But things are ever groping themselves according to higher or more interior
laws. Neighborhood, names. magnitude, glitter, soon cease to draw us. Cause and Effect, real
affinities, the high, progressive, idealizing instinct, these pre dominate later and ever the step
backward from the higher to the lower relations is
Thus even Love which is the deification of persons must become more impersonal every day.25
of this at first it gives no hint. Little think the youth and maiden who are glancing at each other
across crowded rooms with eyes so full of mutual intelligence, little think they of the precious
fruit long hereafter to proceed from this new, quite external stimulus. The work of vegetation
begins first in the irritability of the bark and leaf buds. From exchanging glances they advance to
acts of courtesy, of gallantry, then to fiery passion, to plighting troth and marriage 26 Passion
beholds its object as a perfect unit. The soul is wholly embodied and the body is wholly
ensouled.
shall be harmed.28 But the lot of humanity is on these chil
anger, sorrow, and pain impend to them as to all. Love It makes covenants with the Creator in
behalf of this dear
The union which is thus effected and which bathes the in sweetest emotions which find
expression in every delicate orm and tint of matter is yet a temporary state. Not always can
more pearls, poetry, protestations, nor even home in another heart content the awful soul that
dwells in clay. It arouses itself at last from these endearments as toys and puts on the harness and
aspires to vast and universal aims. The soul which is in the soul of each, craving for a perfect
beatitude, detects incongruities, defects, disproportion in the behaviour of the other; hence arises
surprise and expostulation and pain. But that which drew them at first was signs of loveliness,
signs of virtue. And these virtues are there however eclipsed. They appear and reappear and
continue to attract, but the regard changes, quits the sign and attaches to the substance. This
repairs the wounded affection. Meantime as life wears on it proves a game of permutation and
combination of all possible positions of the parties to extort all the resources of each and
acquaint each with the whole strength and weakness of the other.30
For it is the nature and end of this relation that they should represent as it were the human race to
each other. All that is in the world which is and ought to be known are cunningly wrought into
the texture of man, of woman.
Her pure and eloquent blood Spoke in her cheeks and so distinctly wrought That one might
almost say her body thought.27
Romeo if dead should be cut up into little stars to make the heavens fine. Life with this pair has
no other aim - asks no more than Juliet, than Romeo. Night, day, studies, talents, riches,
kingdoms, religion - are latent all in this form full of soul, - in this soul which is all form. The
lovers delight in endearments, in avowals of love, in comparisons of their regards. When alone,
their happiness is in the imagination of the other. Does that other see the same star; the same
melting cloud; read the same book; feel the same emotion, that now delight me? They love alone
to try and weigh their affection and by enumerating those advantages which they have most
prized, friends, prospects in life, property, to discover that willingly, joyfully they would give an
as a ransom for the beautiful, the beloved head, not one hair o
All the a
The person love does to us fit
Like manna has the taste of all in it.31 he angels that inhabit this temple of the body appear at the
Windows and all the
Lows and all the gnomes and vices also. By all the virtues they de more united. If there is virtue
all the vice
I there is virtue all the vices are known as such, oss and flee,32 Their once flaming regard is
sobered by time
confess and fee.52 Their once
"Passion bcholds . . . shall be tion).
hokis... shall be harmed" (D, 120-121, without the quota
"Love Press
20 the pray's . . . universal aims" (D, 121).
rains in extent, it be
ding. They resign es which man and
lery, of games and humors the plain song of labor, and
Vill
d exchange
ands
Or a
wi
of
ospec
in either breast; losing in violence what it gains in extent comes confidence, a perfect mutual
understanding. The each other without complaint to the good offices which ña woman are
severally appointed to discharge in time and exch the passion which once could not lose sight of
its objectif cheerful, disengaged furtherance whether present or absent each other's designs.33 At
last they discover that all which at drew them together was wholly deciduous, had merely a pro
tive end like the scaffolding by which the house was built and the unsuspected and wholly
unconscious growth of principles from year to year is the real marriage foreseen and prepared
from the first but wholly above their consciousness.34 When I see the grandeur and immense
extent of those aims for which two persons, a man and a woman, so variously and correlatively
gifted, are shut up in one house to spend in the nuptial society forty or fifty years, I cease to
wonder at the emphasis [with] which the creator points out this crisis from early infancy, at the
splendor with which the instincts decorate the nuptial bower and all Nature and all Intellect and
Art emulate one another in the gift and in the melody they bring to the Epithalamium.35
They educate each other to that worth which prizes a grain of Being over all the seeming of
Europe and America; the Yes and No of truth, above a tempest of professions; they educate each
other to know and love the core of character; to see the infinite superiority of simpleness to the
highest glitter of accomplishments without it; to prize a word that is sacred as Fate; and to prize
over all partialities and all fading charms a justice that neither yields to kindness not to fear nor
to self-indulgence and that never forgets. Present or absent; in danger and persecution, or in sun.
shine and troops of friends, living, or dying; that one can be relied on as the axis of the world.
What perturbations and questionings have they forever dismissed! They are to teach each other
by experiment the whole law of Ethics, the whole domain. 2. thought, the whole domain of deed;
to share and so to learn, ornaments of man and woman; the joyous troop of jests and ta
33 “Things nunn Annina wawa.
mes and humors, the cheerful and the merry mood;
song of labor, and household economy; the love and To meet the emergencies of social life, of
charity to the poor Pick the tenderness to soften the ragged hours of calamity un they come and
front unterrified and endure unhurt the
ody of life. And to uplift day by day and year by year the
out and mind of each by opening the whole nature to every heart i Thought as a privilege, - to
every virtue as the incoming and
imitation of God. By strictest dependence they rear each other i independence. Thus they form
each in the other the perfect man, the perfect woman and attain a regard from which every thing
personal is at last utterly excluded; they have called out in each other all the faculties not only of
John and of Joan but all of Adam and of Eve and meet as nations should meet, perfect, spiritual,
self-sufficing, eternal.
Thus are the great objections and antagonisms reconciled. Thus are we put in training of a love
which knows not sex nor person nor partiality but which loveth virtue and wisdom every where
to the end of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers and so learners. That is
our permanent state. The affections are subordinated to the soul. Though slowly and with pain
the objects of the affections change as the objects of thought do. There are moments when the
affections rule and absorb the man but they are only moments. In health the mind is presently
seen again — its overarching vault bright with galaxies of fires; and the warm loves and fears
that swept over us as clouds must lose their finite character and blend with God se to attain their
own perfection. But we need not fear that we can use anything by the progress of the soul. The
soul may be adjusted to the end. That which is so beautiful and attractive as cheese relations,
must be succeeded and supplanted only by what is more beautiful, and that forever. 37
30 €
We are by nature ... blend with God” (D, 112). thus are we put ... and that forever" ("Love," W,
II, 188).