These two beings would have been very
unhappy in their domestic life; and Josephine was a wife accomplished
in a very different sense from this virago of the nineteenth century.
And, indeed, when we praise those undiscoverable girls so happily
educated by chance, so well endowed by nature, whose delicate souls
endure so well the rude contact of the great soul of him we call _a
man_, we mean to speak of those rare and noble creatures of whom
Goethe has given us a model in his Claire of _Egmont_; we are thinking
of those women who seek no other glory than that of playing their part
well; who adapt themselves with amazing pliancy to the will and
pleasure of those whom nature has given them for masters; soaring at
one time into the boundless sphere of their thought and in turn
stooping to the simple task of amusing them as if they were children;
understanding well the inconsistencies of masculine and violent souls,
understanding also their slightest word, their most puzzling looks;
happy in silence, happy also in the midst of loquacity; and well aware
that the pleasures, the ideas and the moral instincts of a Lord Byron
cannot be those of a bonnet-maker. But we must stop; this fair picture
has led us too far from our subject; we are treating of marriage and
not of love.
MEDITATION XII.
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