Your letter rises before me as I write like a tablet of white stone bearing a dead name. I see you standing beside me. I look into your eyes and press your hand and say nothing.

Under the levity of Henri Mürger's picturesque Bohemianism there is a serious philosophy apparent which elevates the characters of his romance to heroism. They followed one principle faithfully—so faithfully that only the strong survived the ordeal—never to abandon the pursuit of an artistic vocation for any other occupation, however lucrative; not even when she remained apparently deaf and blind to her worshipers.

The conditions pictured by Mürger have passed away in Paris as elsewhere; the old barriers to ambition have been broken down. But I think the moral remains.

So long as one can live and pursue his natural vocation in art, it is a duty with him never to abandon it if he believes that he has within him the elements of final success. Every time he labors at aught that is not of art he robs the divinity of what belongs to her.

Do you never reflect that within a few years you will no longer be the young man—and that, like Vesta's fires, the enthusiasm of youth for an art-idea must be well fed with the sacred branches to keep it from dying out?

I think you ought really to devote all your time and energies and ability to the cultivation of one subject, so as to make that subject alone repay you for all your pains.

And I do not believe that art is altogether ungrateful in these days; she will repay fidelity to her, and recompense sacrifices. I don't think you have any more right to play reporter than a great sculptor to model fifty-cent plaster figures of idiotic saints for Catholic processions, or certain painters to letter steamboats at so much a letter. In one sense, too, art is exacting. To acquire real eminence in any one branch of any art, one must study nothing else for a lifetime. A very wide general knowledge may be acquired only at the expense of depth.

If one is really bent on making a marriage of reason instead of waiting for a "call," excellent recipes may be given him.

A wise man once advised his son, who had shown some disposition to choose instead of waiting to be chosen, to "look for a good woman's daughter." It would be hard to find any better basis for a happy union.

In general, of course, mixed marriages, whether the mixture be of religion or of country, would be viewed by a wise adviser with apprehension, although Lord Curzon's experience is only one of very many as to the possible happiness of marriages between persons of different nationalities, much more alike as are the nationalities of Lord and Lady Curzon than any other two nationalities.

Dr. Johnson's famous saying that marriages would be happier if they were arranged by the Lord Chancellor, due regard being paid to the ages and conditions of the parties, has never been accepted as a working rule in his own country. In France, again, there is the wholly "reasonable" and extremely circumspect Count Boni Castellane, whose marriage of reason has so lately been shown to be so far from a success.

There are quite enough more failures of the same kind to offset the unhappy marriages of romance. It is of these, of course, that Burton declares that matches are made in heaven, though matches of the sulfurous kind, of which all of us know some instances, suggest a very different place of manufacture.

The Marriage of Reason.

Swift's saying that the reason why so few marriages are happy is that "young ladies spend their time in making nets, not in making cages," is doubly outrageous. In the first place, it is an outrageous begging of the question. The testimony of less cynical observers in our day and country is that most marriages are entitled to be called happy.

In the second place, it outrageously puts the whole blame for unhappy marriages on the female partner, contrary alike to probability and to fact. But at least as many of the marriages are failures in which men "choose" their wives, or think they do, as in cases in which men become the prey of their own imaginations.

And there is this to be said from the point of view of reason in favor of marriages with which reason has nothing to do. In the first months of married life there are necessarily very many differences to be adjusted and small incompatibilities of ways of thinking and feeling to be reconciled. That, as all experienced spouses know, is the trying period.

Marriage is like life in that it is a school wherein whoso does not learn must suffer. Now, to diminish the friction of this trying time no better lubricant could possibly be provided than the romantic love, which cannot be expected to last forever, but which may very probably outlast this greatest necessity for it of the early connubial period.

When the glamour of the romance "fades into the light of common day," and a real man and a real woman take the places of the creatures of each other's fancy, and passion cools into at best the tenderest of friendships, both parties are better off, and will acknowledge themselves to be better off because the romance has been.