ficial which they do not experience. There are even persons of true sensibility whom this sugared sort of exaggeration cloys with their own impressions; and their feelings become exhausted as we may exhaust their religion, by tedious sermons and superstitious practices. It is wrong to apply the positive ideas which we have of good and evil to the subtilities of sensibility. To accuse this or that character of their deficiencies in this respect, is like making it a crime not to be a poet. The natural susceptibility of those who think more than they act, may render them unjust to persons of a different description. We must possess imagination to conjecture all that the heart can make us suffer; and the best sort of people in the world are often dull and stupid in this respect; they march right across our feelings, as if they were treading upon flowers, and wondering that they fade away. Are there not men who have no admiration for Raphael, who hear music without emotion, to whom the ocean and the heavens are but monotonous appearances? How then should they comprehend the tempests of the soul? Are not even those who are most endowed with sensibility sometimes discouraged in their hopes? May they not be overcome by a sort of inward aridness, as if the Divinity was retiring from their bosoms? They remain not less faithful to their affections; but there is no more incense in the temple, no more music in the sanctuary, no more emotion in the heart. Often also does misfortune bid us silence in ourselves this voice of sentiment, harmonious or distracting in its tone, as it agrees, or not with our destiny. It is then impossible to make a duty of sensibility for those who own it suffer so much from its possession, as frequently to have the right and the desire to subject it to restraint. Nations of ardent character do not talk of sensibility without terror; a peaceable and dreaming people believe they can encourage it without alarm. For the rest, it is possible, that this subject has never been written upon with perfect sincerity; for every one wishes to do himself honor by what he feels, or by what he inspires. Women endeavor to set themselves out like a romance; men, like a history; but the human heart is still far from being penetrated in its most intimate relations. At one time or another, perhaps, somebody will tell us sin cerely all he has felt; and we shall be quite astonished at discovering, that the greater part of maxims and observations are erroneous, and that there is an unknown soul at the bottom of that which we have been describing. CHAPTER XIX. OF LOVE IN MARRIAGE. Ir is in marriage that sensibility is a duty: in every other relation virtue may suffice; but in that in which destinies are intertwined, where the same impulse, so to speak, serves for the beatings of two hearts, it seems that a profound affection is almost a necessary tie. The levity of manners has introduced so much misery into married life, that the moralists of the last age were accustomed to refer all the enjoyments of the heart to paternal and maternal love; and ended by almost considering marriage only in the light of a requisite condition for enjoying the happiness of having children. This is false in morals, and still more false with regard to happiness. It is so easy to be good for the sake of our children, that we ought not to make a great merit of it. In their first years they can have no will but that of their parents; and when they have arrived at youth, they exist by themselves. Justice and goodness compose the principal duties of a relation which nature makes easy. It is not thus in our connections with that half of ourselves, who may find happiness or unhappiness in the least of our actions, of our looks, and of our thoughts. It is there alone that morality can exert itself in its complete energy; it is there also that is placed the true source of felicity. A friend of the same age, in whose presence you are to live and die; a friend whose every interest is your own; all whose prospects are partaken by yourself, including that of the grave: here is a feeling which constitutes all our fate. Sometimes, it is true, our children, and more often our parents, become our companions through life; but this rare and sublime enjoyment is combated by the laws of nature; while the marriage-union is in accord with the whole of human existence. Whence comes it, then, that this so holy union is so often profaned? I will venture to say it, the cause is that remarkable inequality which the opinion of society establishes between the duties of the two parties. Christianity has drawn women out of a state that resembled slavery. Equality, in the sight of God, being the basis of this wonderful religion, it has a tendency towards maintaining the equality of rights upon earth; divine justice, the only perfect justice, admits no kind of privilege, and, above all, refuses that of force. Nevertheless, there have been left, by the slavery of women, some prejudices, which, combining with the great liberty that society allows them, have occasioned many evils. ; It is right to exclude women from political and civil affairs nothing is more opposite to their natural destination than all that would bring them into rivalry with men; and glory itself would be for women only a splendid-mourning suit for happiness. But if the destiny of women ought to consist in a continual act of devotion to conjugal love, the recompense of this devotion is the strict faithfulness of him who is its object. Religion makes no distinction between the duties of the two parties; but the world establishes a wide difference; and out of this difference grows intrigue in women, and resentment in men. "What heart can give itself entirely up, Who then, in good faith, accepts friendship as the price of love? Who sincerely promises constancy to voluntary infidelity? Religion, without doubt, can demand it; for she alone knows the secret of that mysterious land where sacrifices are enjoy ments; but how unjust is the exchange to which man endeavors to make his companion submit! "I will love you," he says, "passionately, for two or three years; and then, at the end of that time, I will talk reason to you." And this, which they call reason, is the disenchantment of life. “I will show, in my own house, coldness and wearisomeness of spirit; I will try to please elsewhere: but you, who are ordinarily possessed of more imagination and sensibility than I am; you, who have nothing to employ, nor to distract you, while the world offers me every sort of avocation; you, who only exist for me while I have a thousand other thoughts; you will be satisfied with that subordinate, icy, divided affection, which it is convenient to me to grant you; and you will reject with disdain all the homage which expresses more exalted and more tender sentiments." How unjust a treaty! all human feeling revolts from it. There is a singular contrast between the forms of respect towards women, which the spirit of chivalry introduced in Europe, and the tyrannical sort of liberty which men have allotted to themselves. This contrast produces all the misfortunes of sentiment, unlawful attachments, perfidy, abandonment, and despair. The German nations have been less afflicted than others with these fatal effects; but they ought, upon this point, to fear the influence which is sure to be exerted at length by modern civilization. It would be better to shut up women like slaves, neither to rouse their understanding nor their imagination, than to launch them into the midst of the world, and to develop all their faculties, in order to refuse them at last the happiness which those faculties render necessary to them. There is an excess of wretchedness in an unhappy marriage which transcends every other misery in the world. The whole soul of a wife reposes upon the attachment of her husband: to struggle alone against fortune; to advance towards the grave without the friend who should regret us; this is an isolated state, of which the Arabian desert gives but a faint idea; and, when all the treasure of your youthful years has been resigned in vain; when you hope no longer, at the end of life, the reflec tion of those early rays; when the twilight has nothing more than can recall the dawn, but is pale and discolored as the phantom that foreruns the night; then your heart revolts; it seems to you that you are deprived of the gifts of God on earth; and if you still love the being who treats you as a slave, since he does not belong to you, and yet disposes of you, despair seizes all your faculties, and Conscience herself grows troubled at the intensity of your distress. Women might address those husbands who treat their fate with levity in these lines of the fable: "Yes! for you it is but play, But it steals our lives away." And until some revolution of ideas shall take place, which changes the opinion of men as to the constancy which the marriage-tie imposes upon them, there will be always war between the two sexes; secret, eternal, cunning, perfidious war; and the morals of both will equally suffer by it. In Germany there is hardly any inequality in marriage between the two sexes; but it is because the women, as often as the men, break the most holy bonds. The facility of divorce introduces in family connections a sort of anarchy which suffers nothing to remain in its proper truth or strength. It would be much better, in order to maintain something sacred upon. earth, that there were one slave in marriage, rather than two free-thinkers. Purity of mind and conduct is the first glory of a woman. What a degraded being would she be, deprived of both these qualities! But general happiness, and the dignity of the hu man species, would perhaps not gain less by the fidelity of man in marriage. In a word, what is there more beautiful in moral order than a young man who respects this sacred tie? Opinion does not require it of him; society leaves him free; a sort of savage pleasantry would endeavor to ridicule even the complaints of the heart which he had broken; for censure is easily turned upon the sufferer. He then is the master, but he im |