I shall try, I have stated, while speaking cogently, to keep my language within the bounds of the strictest decorum. Treating of similar topics with Michelet and Jean Jacques Rousseau, I would fain, while discussing the sphere, the charms, and the complaints of woman, the force and the claims of the passion of love, whether pure or illicit, and the unalloyed, unredeemable evils of purely selfish gratification, escape all semblance alike of approving sensuality and of condemning a rational yielding to natural laws—which last, as I shall be found to define it, must be considered a far different thing from the lustful appetite of a satyr or the nightly phantom of the ascetic, who is such from cowardice alone. Composed as we are, in this fleshly tabernacle, of many a member, and many an adaptation of these to use, combined as one, there is the old, old combat described by St. Paul,—our instincts warring with our better selves, our will and our reason, for mastery. To govern a slave, and govern him well, one need not crucify him. To govern one’s self, it may be necessary severely to discipline, but not always to kill, the body in which we have been placed for so many useful ends. To use, as not abusing ourselves or others, is but collateral to the rule called “golden”—together they form for us the safest of creeds. All men, old or young, seek companionship. This is necessary for their very self-possession, both in body and in mind; and the companionship which they instinctively seek, as truly and as unvaryingly as the loadstar seeks its pole, is that of the opposite sex. Where this special yearning is absent or has never existed, there is to be found, always, the effect of disappointment or of disease. The disease, if such is present, may, it is true, have been self-occasioned, but the vessel itself was either improperly built for the voyage of life or was stopped in its course by some hidden shoal: it has foundered or been wrecked, and we shall find that in by far the majority of cases this was from neglect in obtaining the necessary sailing charts or from non-adjustment of the compass.