asculine intellect
there exists a corresponding grade of the feminine
intellect--Difficulty of finding the true mate--French University
Professors--An extreme case of intellectual separation--Regrets of a
widow--Women help us less by adding to our knowledge than by
understanding us.

In several letters which have preceded this I have indicated some of the
differences between the female sex and ours, and it is time to examine
the true foundations of the intellectual marriage. Let me affirm, to
begin with, my profound faith in the natural arrangement. There is in
nature so much evident care for the development of the intellectual
life, so much protection of it in the social order, there are such
admirable contrivances for continuing it from century to century, that
we may fairly count upon some provision for its necessities in marriage.
Intellectual men are not less alive to the charms of women than other
men are; indeed the greatest of them have always delighted in the
society of women. If marriage were really dangerous to the intellectual
life, it would be a moral snare or pitfall, from which the best and
noblest would be least likely to escape. It is hard to believe that the
strong passions which so often accompany high intellectual gifts were
intended either to drive their possessors into immorality or else to the
misery of ill-assorted unions.

No, there _is_ such a thing as the intellectual marriage, in which the
intellect itself is married. If such marriages are not frequent, it is
that they are not often made the deliberate purpose of a wise alliance.
Men choose their wives because they are pretty, or because they are
rich, or because they are well-connected, but rarely for the permanent
interest of their society. Yet who that had ever been condemned to the
dreadful embarrassments of a _tete-a-tete_ with an uncompanionable
person, could reflect without apprehension on a lifetime of such
_tete-a-tetes_?

When intellectual men suffer from this misery they have themselves to
blame. What is the use of having any mental superiority, if, in a
matter so enormously important as the choice of a companion for life, it
fails to give us a warning when the choice is absurdly unsuitable? When
men complain, as they do not unfrequently, that their wives have no
ideas, the question inevitably suggests itself, why the superiority of
the masculine intellect did not, in these cases, permit it to discover
the defect in t