He had, indeed, plenty of all sorts of brains; but no amount of talent could reveal to him the reason or the meaning of the fact that wedded life was less interesting than courtship; for the former, the reason lay in himself, and of himself proper he knew, as I have said, next to nothing; while the latter, the meaning of the fact, is profound as eternity. He had no notion that, when he married, his life was thereby, in a lofty and blessed sense, forfeit; that, to save his wife's life, he must yield his own, she doing the same for him--for God himself can save no other way. But the notion of any saving, or the need of it, was far from Tom; nor had Letty, for her part, any thought of it either, except from the tyranny of her aunt. Not the less, in truth, did they both want saving--very much saving--before life could be to either of them a good thing. It is only its inborn possibility of and divine tendency toward blossoming that constitute life a good thing. Life's blossom is its salvation, its redemption, the justification of its existence--and is a thing far off with most of us. For Tom, his highest notion of life was to be recognized by the world for that which he had chosen as his idea of himself--to have the reviews allow him a poet, not grudgingly, nor with abatement of any sort, but recognizing him as the genius he must contrive to believe himself, or "perish in" his "self-contempt." Then would he live and die in the blessed assurance that his name would be for over on the lips and in the hearts of that idol of fools they call _posterity_-divinity as vague as the old gray Fate, and less noble, inasmuch as it is but the supposed concave whence is to rebound the man's own opinion of himself.