From “Flower, Fruit, and Thorn Pieces.”

TO girls love is the sun’s propinquity—yes, it is the transition of every such Venus through the sun of the ideal world. In this period of the higher style of their souls they love all that we love—even science—and the whole better world within the bosom; and they despise what we despise—even clothes and news. In the spring, these nightingales sing up to the time of the summer solstice. The wedding day is their longest day. Then the devil fetches away, not everything, indeed, but every day a little bit. The bass bond of marriage ties the poetical wings; and the marriage bed is for the imagination an Engelsburg and a prison with bread-and-water allowance. I have often followed the poor bird of paradise, or peacock of Psyche, in the honeymoon, and in this molting season picked up the glorious feathers of the wings and tail, which the bird scattered abroad; and afterwards, when the husband thinks he has married a naked crow, I show him the bunch of feathers. How explain this? Thus: Marriage overspreads the poetical world with the rind of the real world; as, according to Descartes, our earthly sphere is a sun overlaid with a dirty bark. The hands of labor are awkward, hard, and full of callosities, and find it difficult to continue to hold or draw the fine thread of the ideal woof; therefore, among the higher ranks, where women in lieu of work rooms have only work baskets, where they turn the little spinning wheels on their laps with the finger, and where love still endures in marriage—frequently even towards the husband himself—the marriage ring is not so often as among the lower orders a Gyges-ring, which renders books, and all the arts of music, poetry, painting, and dancing, invisible. Upon heights, plants and flowers of all kinds, especially female plants, become stronger and more spicy. A woman is not able, like a man, to protect her inner castles of air and magic on the outer side exposed to the weather. To what, then, is the wife to cling? To her husband. The husband must always stand near the liquid silver of the female spirit with a spoon, and continually skim off the scum which covers it, that the silver glance of the ideal may continue to glitter.

  But there are two species of husbands—Arcadians, or lyric poets of life, who love forever, like Rousseau, even with gray hairs. Such are not to be controlled or comforted when, in the female “flower wreath,” bound with gilt edges, on turning over the little work, leaf by leaf, they no longer see any of the gold, as is the case with all gilt-edged books.

  Secondly, there are shepherd swains and pastors of itchy sheep—I mean master minstrels, or men of business, who thank God when the enchantress, like other sorceresses, is at length transformed into a grumbling house cat, which destroys the vermin.

  No one has more ennui and fear (and therefore some day I will direct the compassion of my readers to the circumstance in a comic biography) than a fat, pompous, weighty bass singer of a man of business, who, like the Roman elephants in former times, is forced to dance on the slack rope of love, and whose loving gestures and play of features I find most perfectly imaged in the marmot, who, when first awakened from his winter’s sleep by the warmth of the room, finds it so difficult to get into the way of moving. With widows alone, who are less desirous of being loved than of being married, a heavy man of business can begin his romance at the point where all romance writers terminate theirs, namely, upon the step of the marriage altar. Such a man, built in the simplest style, would have a load taken from his heart, if any one would love his shepherdess for him, in his name, so long until he had nothing else to do in the affair but to celebrate the wedding; and no one would have more pleasure in relieving them of this burden or cross than myself. I wanted to advertise myself in the public papers (but was afraid it might be taken for a joke), and announce that I was willing to swear platonic eternal love to all endurable girls whom a man of business has not even the time to love—to make them the necessary declarations of love as plenipotentiary of the husband; and, in short, to lead them, as substitutus sine spe succedendi, or as company cavalier, on my arm, through the whole uneven land of love, until, on the borders, I should be able to deliver over my charge, ready prepared, to the sponsus (bridegroom). This would then be a love-making, rather than a marriage, by embassadors. If, in accordance with such a systema assistentiæ, any one would wish to employ the writer of this article as feoffee and principal commissary even in the honeymoon itself, as some love also occurs at this period, he must be man of sense enough to make the condition beforehand, that—