of such a union is unveiled, in the tribute paid
to his wife, by Sir James Mackintosh. He says, "I found an
intelligent companion and a tender friend, a prudent monitress, the
most faithful of wives, and a mother as tender as children ever had
the misfortune to lose. I met a woman, who, by tender management of
my weaknesses, gradually corrected the most pertinacious of them. She
became prudent from affection; and, though of the most generous
nature, she was taught frugality and economy by her love for me. She
gently reclaimed me from dissipation, propped my weak and irresolute
nature, urged my indolence to all the exertion that has been useful
and creditable to me, and was perpetually at hand to admonish my
heedlessness or improvidence. In her solicitude for my interest, she
never for a moment forgot my feelings or character. Even in her
occasional resentment, for which I but too often gave her cause,
(would to God I could recall those moments!) she had no sullenness or
acrimony. Such was she whom I have lost, when her excellent natural
sense was rapidly improving, after eight years' struggle and distress
had bound us fast together and moulded our tempers to each other;
when a knowledge of her worth had refined my youthful love into
friendship, and before age had deprived it of much of its original
ardor."

It is to be presumed that those who enter into a relation with each
other on which so much of their destiny is staked, take the step
under the influence of love. And by love the love which looks to a
conjugal union is to be understood a general movement of personal
sympathy, imparting a special richness and intensity to the
imagination in its action toward the individuals concerned, and thus
giving each of them a genial and generous idea of the other to govern
their mutual references; the whole operation being animated and
emphasized, more or less prominently, by the impulse of sex. The idea
of each other with which the wedded pair begin their union, an idea
ennobled and vivified by imagination, and serving as the basis and
stimulus of their love, may be largely made up of illusions, or may
be sound, though inadequate. In the former case, one of three results
will follow, either, as the poetic illusions are dispelled, and the
fancied charms of the soul are replaced by barren poverty or haggard
ugliness, the ardor of affection will be reversed by disappointment
and friction into antipathy, engendering a chronic state