resources of each and acquaint each with the
strength and weakness of the other. For it is the nature and end of this
relation, that they should represent the human race to each other.
All that is in the world, which is or ought to be known, is cunningly
wrought into the texture of man, of woman:--

"The person love does to us fit,
Like manna, has the taste of all in it."

The world rolls; the circumstances vary every hour. The angels that
inhabit this temple of the body appear at the windows, and the gnomes
and vices also. By all the virtues they are united. If there be virtue,
all the vices are known as such; they confess and flee. Their once
flaming regard is sobered by time in either breast, and losing
in violence what it gains in extent, it becomes a thorough good
understanding. They resign each other without complaint to the good
offices which man and woman are severally appointed to discharge in
time, and exchange the passion which once could not lose sight of its
object, for a cheerful, disengaged furtherance, whether present or
absent, of each other's designs. At last they discover that all which at
first drew them together,--those once sacred features, that magical play
of charms,--was deciduous, had a prospective end, like the scaffolding
by which the house was built; and the purification of the intellect and
the heart from year to year is the real marriage, foreseen and prepared
from the first, and wholly above their consciousness. Looking at
these aims with 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 do not wonder at the emphasis with which
the heart prophesies this crisis from early infancy, at the profuse
beauty with which the instincts deck the nuptial bower, and nature and
intellect and art emulate each other in the gifts and the melody they
bring to the epithalamium.

Thus are we put in training for a love which knows not sex, nor person,
nor partiality, but which seeks virtue and wisdom everywhere, to the end
of increasing virtue and wisdom. We are by nature observers, and thereby
learners. That is our permanent state. But we are often made to feel
that our affections are but tents of a night. 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 and
make his ha