The misfortune of Goethe appears to have been that he dreaded and avoided marriage in early life, perhaps because he was instinctively aware of his own tendency to form many attachments of limited duration; but his treatment of Christiane Vulpius, so much beyond any obligations which, according to the world's code, he had incurred, is sufficient proof that there was a power of constancy in his nature; and if he had married early and suitably it is possible that this constancy might have stayed and steadied him from the beginning. It is easy to imagine that a marriage with a cultivated woman of his own class would have given him, in course of time, by mutual adaptation, a much more complete companionship than either of those semi-associations with the Frau von Stein and Christiane, each of which only included a part of his great nature. Christiane, however, had the better part, his heartfelt affection. The case of John Stuart Mill and the remarkable woman by whose side he lies buried at Avignon, is the most perfect instance of thorough companionship on record; and it is remarkable especially because men of great intellectual power, whose ways of thinking are quite independent of custom, and whose knowledge is so far outside the average as to carry their thoughts continually beyond the common horizon, have an extreme difficulty in associating themselves with women, who are naturally attached to custom, and great lovers of what is settled, fixed, limited, and clear. The ordinary disposition of women is to respect what is authorized much more than what is original, and they willingly, in the things of the mind, bow before anything that is repeated with circumstances of authority. An isolated philosopher has no costume or surroundings to entitle him to this kind of respect. He wears no vestment, he is not magnified by any architecture, he is not supported by superiors or deferred to by subordinates. He stands simply on his abilities, his learning, and his honesty. There is, however, this one chance in his favor, that a certain natural sympathy may possibly exist between him and some woman on the earth,--if he could only find her,--and this woman would make him independent of all the rest. It was Stuart Mill's rare good-fortune to find this one woman, early in life, in the person of Mrs. Taylor; and as his nature was intellectual and affectionate rather than passionate, he was able to rest contented with simple friendship for a period of twenty years. Indeed this friendship itself, considered only as such, was of very gradual growth. "To be admitted," he wrote, "into any degree of mental intercourse with a being of these qualities, could not but have a most beneficial influence on my development; though the effect was only gradual, and many years elapsed before her mental progress and mine went forward in the complete companionship they at last attained. The benefit I received was far greater than any I could hope to give.... What