I have
known many such cases. It is the most momentous question a woman is
ever called upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are
beyond remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be
his earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.

A person of genius should marry a person of character. Genius does not
herd with genius. The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never found in
company. They don't care for strange scents,--they like plain animals
better than perfumed ones. Nay, if you will have the kindness to notice,
Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the personal peculiarity by
which her lord is so widely known.

Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt to
think character has the best of the bargain. A brilliant woman marries a
plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual mechanism;--we have all
seen such cases. The world often stares a good deal and wonders. She
should have taken that other, with a far more complex mental machinery.
She might have had a watch with the philosophical compensation-balance,
with the metaphysical index which can split a second into tenths, with
the musical chime which can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.
She has chosen a plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.

Let her alone! She knows what she is about. Genius has an infinitely
deeper reverence for character than character can have for genius. To
be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its work is a tangible
product, to be bought, or had for nothing. It bribes the common voice to
praise it by presents of speeches, poems, statues, pictures, or whatever
it can please with. Character evolves its best products for home
consumption; but, mind you, it takes a deal more to feed a family for
thirty years than to make a holiday feast for our neighbors once or
twice in our lives. You talk of the fire of genius. Many a blessed
woman, who dies unsung and unremembered, has given out more of the real
vital heat that keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting
through her humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a
dozen theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of
so many men of genius. It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a
philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out the
life that warms them. Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse hardly
warms her thin fingers,--but she has