What is the singing of birds, or any natural sound, compared with the voice of one we love?
To one we love we are related as to nature in the spring. Our dreams are mutually intelligible. We take the census, and find that there is one.
Love is a mutual confidence whose foundations no one knows. The one I love surpasses all the laws of nature in sureness. Love is capable of any wisdom.
“He that hath love and judgment too
Sees more than any other doe.”
By our very mutual attraction, and our attraction to all other spheres, kept properly asunder. Two planets which are mutually attracted, being at the same time attracted by the sun, preserve equipoise and harmony.
Does not the history of chivalry and knight-errantry suggest or point to another relation to woman than leads to marriage, yet an elevating and all-absorbing one, perchance transcending marriage? As yet men know not one another, nor does man know woman.
I am sure that the design of my maker when he has brought me nearest to woman was not the propagation, but rather the maturation, of the species. Man is capable of a love of woman quite transcending marriage.
I observe that the New York Herald advertises situations wanted by “respectable young women” by the column, but never by respectable young men, rather “intelligent” and “smart” ones; from which I infer that the public opinion of New York does not require young men to be respectable in the same sense in which it requires young women to be so.