Mr. Mill's fine face revealed his delight at the prospect of being read to. So Mrs. Taylor read a little aloud to Mr. Mill, while Mr. Taylor took a much-needed nap in the corner.
In a few days Mr. Mill called to return Mrs. Taylor's manuscript and leave a little essay he himself had written on a similar theme. Mr. Taylor was greatly pleased at this fine friendship that had sprung up between his gifted wife and young Mr. Mill—Mrs. Taylor was so much improved in health, so much more buoyant! Thursday night soon became sacred at the Taylors' to Mr. Mill, and Sunday he always took dinner with them.
Goldwin Smith, a trifle grumpy, with a fine forgetfulness as to the saltness of time, says that young Mr. Mill had been kept such a recluse that when he met Mrs. Taylor he considered that he was the first man to discover the potency of sex, and that he thought his experience was unique in the history of mankind.
Perhaps love does make a fool of a man—I really can not say. If so, then John Stuart Mill never recovered his sanity. Suppose we let John speak for himself—I quote from his "Autobiography":
It was at the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honor and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect hereafter, for human improvement.
My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was in Eighteen Hundred Thirty, when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.
I very soon felt her to be the most admirable person I had ever known.
It is not to be supposed that she was, or that any one, at the age at which I first saw her, could be, all that she became afterwards. Least of all could this be true of her, with whom self-improvement, progress in the highest and in all senses, was a law of her nature; a necessity equally from the ardor with which she sought it, and from the spontaneous tendency of faculties which could not receive an impression or an experience without making it the source or occasion of an accession of wisdom.