ngredient is so important, that it infuses its
quality into their very thoughts, and gives the distinctive character
of love to their whole relation. With others this feature in the
marriage fellowship becomes relatively less as the heyday of youth
subsides, and the moral and mental bonds become more various and
extensive. The physical tie, however vital, is insignificant in
comparison with the entire web of their conscious ties. Love is
included in their whole relation, as a rivulet threading a lake. This
subordination of the stream to the lake is surest to take place with
those in whom pure mind most predominates, whose spirit is least
roiled by the perturbation of the senses. With such it is almost a
necessity, when hate or indifference does not intervene, that love
should refine into friendship. As the ferment of passion ceases, the
lees settle, and a transparent sympathy appears, reflecting all
heavenly and eternal things.

As an example of the transmutation of passion into sentiment, of
impulse into principle, of feverish flame into calm fire, we may
instance the Greek Pericles and Aspasia, who were friends even more
than lovers, their intellectual companionship and common pursuit of
culture being one of the precious traditions of humanity. Grote,
whose learning, ability, and fairness give weight to his opinion,
affirms his belief that the vile charges brought against Aspasia were
the offspring of lying gossip and scandal. The estimate of her
talents and accomplishments was so high that the authorship of the
greatest speech ever delivered by Pericles was attributed to her. She
is also particularly interesting to us as the first woman who kept an
open parlor for the visits of chosen friends and the culture of
conversation, as the earliest queen of the drawing room. Her house
was the centre of the highest literary and philosophical society of
Athens. Socrates himself was a constant visitor there. There too, as
Plutarch asserts, many of the most distinguished Athenian matrons
were wont to go with their husbands for the pleasure and profit of
her conversation.

In Roman history we may point to Brutus and his heroic Portia, who
was fully capable of entering into all his counsels, dangers, and
hopes, and, when he fell, of dying as became the daughter of Cato.
The characters of the noble and Arria were likewise in perfect
accord, in their high strains of wisdom, valor, and virtue; and when
the brutal emperor, Claudius