urifying effect on the character.
It tends to emancipate one from the slavery of self. It is altogether
unsordid; itself is its only price. It inspires gentleness, sympathy,
mutual faith, and confidence. True love also in a measure elevates the
intellect. "All love renders wise in a degree," says the poet Browning,
and the most gifted minds have been the sincerest lovers. Great
souls make all affections great; they elevate and consecrate all true
delights. The sentiment even brings to light qualities before lying
dormant and unsuspected. It elevates the aspirations, expands the soul,
and stimulates the mental powers. One of the finest compliments ever
paid to a woman was that of Steele, when he said of Lady Elizabeth
Hastings, "that to have loved her was a liberal education." Viewed in
this light, woman is an educator in the highest sense, because, above
all other educators, she educates humanly and lovingly.

It has been said that no man and no woman can be regarded as complete in
their experience of life, until they have been subdued into union with
the world through their affections. As woman is not woman until she
has known love, neither is man man. Both are requisite to each other's
completeness. Plato entertained the idea that lovers each sought a
likeness in the other, and that love was only the divorced half of
the original human being entering into union with its counterpart. But
philosophy would here seem to be at fault, for affection quite as often
springs from unlikeness as from likeness in its object.

The true union must needs be one of mind as well as of heart, and based
on mutual esteem as well as mutual affection. "No true and enduring
love," says Fichte, "can exist without esteem; every other draws regret
after it, and is unworthy of any noble human soul." One cannot really
love the bad, but always something that we esteem and respect as well as
admire. In short, true union must rest on qualities of character, which
rule in domestic as in public life.

But there is something far more than mere respect and esteem in the
union between man and wife. The feeling on which it rests is far deeper
and tenderer--such, indeed, as never exists between men or between
women. "In matters of affection," says Nathaniel Hawthorne, "there is
always an impassable gulf between man and man. They can never quite
grasp each other's hands, and therefore man never derives any intimate
help, any heart-sustenance, from his bro