"It must have been otherwise of old, else how could Homer have created the lovely, wholesome, tender picture of Nausikaa? Nausikaa loves Ulysses at the first glance. She says at once to her female friends: 'Oh, that I could call such a man my spouse, and that it were his destiny to remain here.' She was even too modest to appear in public at the same time with him, and she says, in his presence, that if she should bring such a handsome and majestic stranger home, the people would say, she may have taken him for a husband. How simple and natural all this is! But when she heard that he was going home to his wife and children, no murmur escaped her. She disappears from our sight, and we feel that she carried the picture of the handsome and majestic stranger a long time afterward in her breast, with silent and joyful admiration. Why do not our poets know this love--this joyful acknowledgment, this calm abnegation? A later poet would have made a womanish Werter out of Nausikaa, for the reason that love with us is nothing more than the prelude to the comedy, or the tragedy, of marriage. Is it true there is no longer any other love? Has the fountain of this pure happiness wholly dried up? Are men only acquainted with the intoxicating draught, and no longer with the invigorating well-spring of love?" At these words the English poet occurred to me, who also thus complains: From heaven if this belief be sent, If such be nature's holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man.