course, in generalities; for there are no rules immutably governing all cases, and life is mellowed and beautified by shining, sensible examples, in which Mr. Todd and Miss Lemon become one, yet realize that in many respects, being human, they must still remain two; then, indeed, the congratulator may actually be enriched by the acquisition of a new friend—but not instantly, as one is enriched by the acquisition of a new hat. Yet it is always the wiser part, in preparing to meet a beloved, to prepare for the worst.

These are evidently the apprehensions of a bachelor, sensitive but not unselfish; the mental attitude is different with a student, philosopher, and idealist who, thinking not of himself, contemplates another’s marriage in the calm, intelligent way, having as yet no beloved in which he can contemplate his own. Such a one weighs. Such a one is conscious that, little as he knows the beloved of Mr. Todd or Miss Lemon, there is grave danger that Mr. Todd knows Miss Lemon, or Miss Lemon Mr. Todd, hardly better. This happy-madness may not only be a delusion, as a calm outside intelligence contemplates it, but it may be a snare. Mistakes do happen. There are known cases in which the happy lunatic has been mistaken in a beloved not once but often; and the persistent effort of these poor madmen and madwomen to correct one mistake by making another is one of the most discussed and pitiable phases of our civilization. The calm intelligence must balance also the practical aspects of the business, its risks and liabilities as well as its profits; and so serious is the enterprise when thus examined that he can hardly fail to be terrified for anybody he knows and loves who is undertaking it.

O Harvey! Harvey! (or Margaret! Margaret!)

Tact is what he will pray for. And if his prayer is granted, when Mr. Todd (or Miss Lemon) asks him, “Now, honestly, what do you think of her (or him)?” he will say, “Of course I do not know Miss Lemon (or Mr. Todd) very well yet, but I have never met anybody whom I hoped to know and like better.” Which will be quite true, and please the twittering questioner much more than if he said, “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t know.”

IV

THIS IS A FATHER

IN the life of man fatherhood is so likely to happen, that I wonder Shakespeare did not select father as a natural, and indeed inevitable, successor to lover in his well-known seven ages. He chose the soldier, “full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,” presumably because such soldiers were common in Elizabethan London. But fathers must have been more so: they must have gone in droves past the tavern window where Shakespeare (as what we now call the “wets” so like to think) sat at his ale-stained table, dipping now his quill in an inkwell, and again his nose in a tankard; but they seem to have made no impression. Indeed this unromantic, necessary figure, composite as it is of all sorts and conditions of men, has never appealed strongly to the poets; perhaps it is their revenge because fathers so seldom read poetry.

Whatever else a man does, whether he lives by banking or burglary, ascends to the presidency or descends to the gutter, he is likely to be a father: they are as countless as the pebbles on a beach or the leaves in Vallombrosa, and the few who evade paternity evade also the purpose for which nature evidently created them, and go through life thumbing their noses, so to speak, at Divine Providence. So taken for granted is this vocation of fatherhood, and so little considered in comparison with other masculine employments, that no correspondence school offers a course, and many a young man undertakes to raise children with less hesitation than he would start in to raise chickens. Some accept fatherhood with joy, others with resignation, like a recently wedded young Italian who cobbles my shoes, and spoke the other day of his own new little one. “Zee fadder and zee modder,” he said, “zey work and zey slave for zee leetle one. But what-a good? When he is grow up, he say, ‘To hell wiz zee fadder and zee modder!’” And so, as Shakespeare may have decided, there is no universal type of fatherhood, nor has the imagination of mankind created one, as in the case of mothers, for convenient literary and conversational use. The lines of the balladist,—