earth, where at best they are suggestive of grossness, mainly because earth is yet principally inhabited by savages and barbarians, the majority of whom are to be looked for, not in the forests and wilderness, but right in the midst of what passes for civilization the great wide world over. "Well, there is no valid or good reason why ourselves and our neighbors on earth should not realize just as sweet and pure a bliss. Indeed, if love prevails it cannot be otherwise! To woman, and her only, in every possible situation in which the harsher sex may be situated by the exigencies of life and circumstance, that great viewless master of us all, does it owe all that inspires it to action, and enables it to win place, name, honor, and renown; and that not merely by reason of physical gender, but by the universal love, sweetness, light, and emotion of which she is the incarnation, crystallization, and embodiment. Without her aid, right from the heart, life is worth but little to any man, if he be really what those three little letters mean. Without, or bereft of her influence in a thousand ways, there can be no lasting laurels won, at least none really worth the having. And the woman is unwise, be she wife or not, who fails to realize this most sterling of all social facts upon which is based so very much. It is the secret of her power, and the assurance of her magnificent possible success in moulding and shaping the destiny of the world!
One of the most cruel things, and — as all cruel things are, to the natural kindly human heart difficult — one of the most difficult things for a young man or woman to make real to themselves is the fact that there will come a time when good friends will part, and really honest people will stand upon different sides of the way, opposed to each other, and sacrificing friendship to principle. All the walks of life have divergent alleys, down which, one by one, our friends go. . . . The ambition of my life was to be united to one to whom, in old age I could say: —
And when with envy time transported
Shall think to rob us of our joys,
You'll in your girls again be courted,
And I'll go wooing in my boys.
But it was not to be. At this end of life my advice to all young men is: Love well, and marry early. Be not ambitious,
