lse was a reproduction of itself in another
being.

Were she and Hamilton but the victims of a mighty ego roaming the
Universe in search of a medium for human expression? Were they but
helpless sacrifices, consummately equipped, that the result of their
union might be consummately great? Who shall affirm or deny? The very
commonplaces of life are components of its eternal mystery. We know
absolutely nothing. But we have these facts: that a century and a half
ago, on a tropical island, where, even to common beings, quick and
intense love must seem the most natural thing in the world, this man and
woman met; that the woman, herself born in unhappy conditions, but
beautiful, intellectual, with a character developed far beyond her years
and isolated home by the cruel sufferings of an early marriage, reared
by a woman whose independence and energy had triumphed over the narrow
laws of the Island of her birth, given her courage to snap her fingers
at society--we know that this woman, inevitably remarkable, met and
loved a stranger from the North, so generously endowed that he alone of
all the active and individual men who surrounded her won her heart; and
that the result of their union was one of the stupendous intellects of
the world's history.

Did any great genius ever come into the world after commonplace
pre-natal conditions? Was a maker of history ever born amidst the
pleasant harmonies of a satisfied domesticity? Of a mother who was less
than remarkable, although she may have escaped being great? Did a woman
with no wildness in her blood ever inform a brain with electric fire?
The students of history know that while many mothers of great men have
been virtuous, none have been commonplace, and few have been happy. And
lest the moralists of my day and country be more prone to outraged
virtue, in reading this story, than were the easy-going folk who
surrounded it, let me hasten to remind them that it all happened close
upon a hundred and fifty years ago, and that the man and woman who gave
them the brain to which they owe the great structure that has made their
country phenomenal among nations, are dust on isles four hundred miles
apart.

A century and a half ago women indulged in little introspective
analysis. They thought on broad lines, and honestly understood the
strength of their emotions. Moreover, although Mary Wollstonecraft was
unborn and "Emile" unwritten, Individualism was germinating; and what
soil so quic