has been free to chase his fancies over the wide world,
without let or hindrance, shut himself up to marriage-ship, within four
walls called home, that are to claim him, his time, his trouble, and
his tears, thenceforward forevermore, without doubts thick, and
thick-coming as smoke?

Shall he who has been hitherto a mere observer of other men's cares and
business--moving off where they made him sick of heart, approaching
whenever and wherever they made him gleeful--shall he now undertake
administration of just such cares and business, without qualms? Shall
he, whose whole life has been but a nimble succession of escapes from
trifling difficulties, now broach without doubtings--that matrimony,
where if difficulty beset him there is no escape? Shall this brain of
mine, careless-working, never tired with idleness, feeding on long
vagaries and high, gigantic castles, dreaming out beatitudes hour by
hour--turn itself at length to such dull task-work as thinking out a
livelihood for wife and children?

Where thenceforward will be those sunny dreams, in which I have warmed
my fancies, and my heart, and lighted my eye with crystal? This very
marriage, which a brilliant working imagination has invested time and
again with brightness and delight, can serve no longer as a mine for
teeming fancy. All, alas! will be gone--reduced to the dull standard
of the actual. No more room for intrepid forays of imagination--no
more gorgeous realm-making. All will be over!

Why not, I thought, go on dreaming?

Can any wife be prettier than an after-dinner fancy, idle and yet
vivid, can paint for you? Can any children make less noise than the
little rosy-cheeked ones who have no existence except in the omnium
gatherum of your own brain? Can any housewife be more unexceptionable
than she who goes sweeping daintily the cobwebs that gather in your
dreams? Can any domestic larder be better stocked than the private
larder of your head dozing on a cushioned chair-back at Delmonico's?
Can any family purse be better filled than the exceeding plump one you
dream of, after reading such pleasant books as Munchausen or Typee?

But if, after all, it must be--duty, or what-not, making
provocation--what then? And I clapped my feet hard against the
fire-dogs, and leaned back, and turned my face to the ceiling, as much
as to say, And where on earth, then, shall a poor devil look for a wife?

Somebody says--Lyttleton or Shaftesbury, I think--that