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and peace, a capacious mind full of grand aspirations, married, by some fatal chance, to a woman with a petty soul, a teasing and tyrannical temper, a mendacious and rasping tongue, whose taste is for small gossip and scandal, whose ambition is for fashionable show and noise, whose life is one incessant fret and sting, it may be doubted if this man's lot is not severer with his ill matched consort than hers would be with the worst husband in the world. He had better marry a vinegar cruet than such a Tartar. When weary and seeking to rest, to be roused up by a scolding; when searching for truth, or contemplating beauty, or communing with God, or aspiring to perfection, or scheming some vast good for mankind, to be aggravated by abuse, insulted by false charges, dragged down to petty interests which he despises, and mixed up with wrongs and passions which he loathes, these degrading injuries, these wasteful vexations, are what he must endure. No wonder if he vehemently resents a treatment so incongruous with his worth. No wonder if, vexed, hurt, goaded half to madness, he gets enraged, and unseemly contentions ensue, followed by painful depression and remorseful grief. No wonder if he finds it hard indeed to forget or to forgive the infliction of an evil so incomparably profound and frightful. There is, to a high smiled man, no wrong more hurtful or more difficult to pardon than to have mean motives falsely ascribed to him, to be placed by misinterpretation on a lower plane than that where he belongs. Every such experience stabs the moral source of life, and draws blood from the soul itself. Husband and wife powerfully tend to a common level and likeness. The higher must redeem and lift the unequal mate, or live in strife and misery. If the lower takes pattern after the superior one, the petty, frivolous, false, and fretful becoming magnanimous, dedicated, truthful, and serene, it is a divine triumph of grace, and the result will be full of blessedness. But otherwise a wearing unhappiness is inevitable, however carefully it be hidden, however bravely it be borne. George Sand says very strikingly of Rousseau and Therese Levasseur, "His true fault was in persevering in his attachment for that vulgar woman, who turned to her own profit the weaknesses of his ill starred character and his self torturing imagination. One does not with impunity live in company with a little soul. When one is a Jean Jacques Rousseau, one does no
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