we
have been most intimate, is our unfailing surprise at the marriages they
make. Very old and experienced people fancy they know a great deal about
younger couples, but their guesses, there is good reason to believe,
never _exactly_ hit the mark.

Ever since this idea, that marriage is a subject we are all very
ignorant about, had taken root in my own mind, many little incidents
were perpetually occurring to confirm it; they proved to me, on the one
hand, how often I had been mistaken about other people, and, on the
other hand, how mistaken other people were concerning the only marriage
I profess to know anything about, namely, my own.

Our ignorance is all the darker that few men tell us the little that
they know, that little being too closely bound up with that innermost
privacy of life which every man of right feeling respects in his own
case, as in the case of another. The only instances which are laid bare
to the public view are the unhappy marriages, which are really not
marriages at all. An unhappy alliance bears exactly the same relation to
a true marriage that disease does to health, and the quarrels and misery
of it are the crises by which Nature tries to bring about either the
recovery of happiness, or the endurable peace of a settled separation.

All that we really know about marriage is that it is based upon the most
powerful of all our instincts, and that it shows its own justification
in its fruits, especially in the prolonged and watchful care of
children. But marriage is very complex in its effects, and there is one
set of effects, resulting from it, to which remarkably little attention
has been paid hitherto,--I mean its effects upon the intellectual life.
Surely they deserve consideration by all who value culture.

I believe that for an intellectual man, only two courses are open;
either he ought to marry some simple dutiful woman who will bear him
children, and see to the household matters, and love him in a trustful
spirit without jealousy of his occupations; or else, on the other hand,
he ought to marry some highly intelligent lady, able to carry her
education far beyond school experiences, and willing to become his
companion in the arduous paths of intellectual labor. The danger in the
first of the two cases is that pointed out by Wordsworth in some verses
addressed to lake-tourists who might feel inclined to buy a peasant's
cottage in Westmorland. The tourist would spoil the little romantic