There is nothing more common in experience and observation than the partiality felt by young and unmarried men for the society of married women, and the love of unmarried young women for the society of married men. I suppose that nearly every young man and young woman has a time of feeling that all the desirable matches in the world are disposed of, and that the marriageable young persons left are really very insipid companions. This is entirely natural, but exceedingly unreasonable. To expect a man to be as much of a man without a wife as with one, is just as reasonable as to expect a half-finished house to be as beautiful as a finished one. It is impossible for an unmarried man, other things being equal, to be as agreeable a companion as a married man; and lest I be suspected of a jest in this statement, I wish to assure my reader that I am entirely in earnest. Intimate contact with the nature of a good woman, in the relation of marriage, is just as necessary to the completeness of manhood, as the details of an architectural design are to the homely conveniences around which they are made to cluster. Every man is a better man for having children, and the more he extends those relations which grow out of the family life, the more does he open up to culture and carry to completeness the very choicest portions of his manly nature. It is natural, therefore, that the unmarried woman should become possessed of the notion that all the desirable men are married, and that the unmarried man should be the subject of a similar mistake with relation to the other sex. It must be remembered that men and women are made desirable by matrimony, and that half-finished work should not be subjected to any sweeping judgments. Men and women are always turning out differently from what we expected and predicted they would. Men who have been laughed at and slighted during all their early life, become, quite to our surprise, very important and notable persons, and we are mortified to ascertain that we have been criticizing half-finished men. The college faculty give a diploma to some very slow young man, with great reluctance, but in the course of twenty years he completes himself, and when he comes back to honor them with a visit they make very low bows to him. All young people are pieces of unfinished work, to be judged very carefully, and always to be regarded as incomplete. We can say that we do not like their general style, as we would say that we do not like the style of an unfinished house. Grecian may not be to our liking, and we may prefer Gothic.