, our antecedent plans, have no part in the
decision. The woman we choose appears at the wrong time, in the wrong
place, in an undesirable environment, with hair and eyes and general
complexion different in colour from what we had predestined for
ourselves, short when we had made up our minds for tall, and tall when
we had hoped for short. Yet, in in spite of all our preconceptions, we
choose her. This is not properly a choice in which the intelligence
confessedly submits to violence. It is the compulsion of mysterious
instincts that know better than our brains or our tastes.

Now had she been asked beforehand, Esther might not have sketched out a
Mike as the ideal of her maiden dreams, nor indeed might Henry have
described an Angelica, any more than perhaps Mike an Esther, or Angelica
a Henry. Yet chance has only to place Esther and Mike, and Angelica and
Henry in the same room together for less than a minute of time, and they
fly into the arms of each other's souls with an instant recognition.
This is a mystery which it will take more than biology to explain.

A young man's dreams of the woman he will some day marry are apt to be
meretricious, or at all events conventional. A young poet, especially,
is likely to err in the direction of paragons of beauty, or fame, or
romance. Perhaps he dreams of a great singer, or an illustrious beauty,
ignorant of the natural law which makes great singers and illustrious
beauties, in common with all artists, incapable of loving really any one
but themselves. Or perhaps it will be some woman of great and exquisite
culture. But chance knows that women of great and exquisite culture are
usually beings lacking in those plastic elemental qualities which a
poet, above all men, needs in the woman he shall love. Their very
culture, while it may seem to broaden, really narrows them, limits them
to a caste of mind, and, for an infinite suggestiveness, substitutes a
few finite accomplishments.

Critics without understanding have wondered now and again at attachments
such as that of Heine for his Mathilde. Yet in some ways Mathilde was
the type of wife best suited for a poet. She was just a wondering child,
a bit of unspoiled chaos. She meant as little intellectually, and as
much spiritually, as a wave of the sea, a bird of the air, a star in
the sky.

Another great poet always kept in his room a growing plant in a big tub
of earth, and another tub full of fresh water. With the fire going, h