Hung over her enamoured.[397]
"This is that sort of passion which truly deserves the name of 'love,' and has something more generous than friendship itself; for it has a constant care of the object beloved, abstracted from its own interests in the possession of it." Sappho was proceeding on the subject, when my sister produced a letter sent to her in the time of my absence, in celebration of the marriage state, which is the condition wherein only this sort of passion reigns in full authority. The epistle is as follows:
"DEAR MADAM,
"Your brother being absent, I dare take the liberty of writing to you my thoughts of that state, which our whole sex either is or desires to be in: you'll easily guess I mean matrimony, which I hear so much decried, that it was with no small labour I maintained my ground against two opponents; but, as your brother observed of Socrates, I drew them into my conclusion from their own concessions; thus:
"In marriage are two happy things allowed,
A wife in wedding-sheets, and in a shroud.
How can a marriage state then be accursed,
Since the last day's as happy as the first?
"If you think they were too easily confuted, you may conclude them not of the first sense, by their talking against marriage.
"Yours,