burden him with her love, since both are self-existent and entirely independent of anything he gives or takes away. Thus she will marry neither from liking nor esteem, nor gratitude for his love, but from the fulness of her own. If they never marry, as sometimes happens ... God will cause them to meet in the next existence. They cannot be parted; they belong to one another.' "These are helpful words, and true; but there is a passage by poor George Eliot (alas for that adjective!), which to me is still more beautiful, and with which I cannot do better than conclude. 'What greater thing is there,' she says, 'for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain,' and, 'to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?'" * * * * * I was interested in this article as well as in the writer, and asked him for further contributions. He responded by sending a couple of sonnets, and although the "swing of his arm" was, to quote Rossetti, "freer in prose than in verse," I accepted, and printed them in the journal of which I had charge. When I came to know him afterwards, I found that he was young, and of that highly-strung nervous and poetic temperament which often proves little less than a calamity to its possessor. A more morbidly sensitive being I never met. The emotional part of his nature seemed in excess, and he felt all--the small as well as the great, the pleasant as well as the painful--intensely. His nervous vitality was too near the surface. He was easily "worked-up," and took life, or rather its incidents, too seriously. The one intellectual thing which men of such a temperament would be wise to refrain from doing, is not seldom the very thing they do--abandon themselves passionately to the pursuit of poetry. After that there is little hope for them. The world may be the richer by many a work of art, but from thenceforth and for ever Sorrow will have them for her own. "Poetry strikes as nothing else does, deep into the roots of things," says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and "one finds everywhere some strain at the roots of one's heart." Moreover, the pursuit of poetry is a practice which as surely grows upon one as does the use of drug or opiate, and my advice to the men and women of a highly-strung and supersensitive temperament--if they wish to make comfort their first consideration--is, "Avoid poetry as you would poison, making instead a study of that which is animal and coarse. Music and all other 'softening' influences you will, in accordance with the contention of Plato in 'The Republic,' deliberately eschew, striving rather to acquire that delightful pachydermatous condition of feeling and enviable indifference to the susceptibilities of others, which add so immeasurably to the comfort of life."