Quite as large is the list of “rebels to domestic ties” among men of poetic genius. Says Moore: “The coincidence is no less striking than saddening that, on the list of married poets who have been unhappy in their homes, there should already be found four such illustrious names as Dante, Milton, Shakspere, and Dryden.” “The poet Dante, a wanderer away from wife and children, passed the whole of a restless life in nursing his immortal dream of Beatrice.” “The dates of the birth of his [Shakspere’s] children, compared with that of his removal from Stratford, the total omission of his wife’s name in the first draft of his will, and the bitter sarcasm of the bequest by which he remembers her afterwards—all prove beyond a doubt his separation from the lady early in life, and his unfriendly feeling towards her at the close.” “Milton’s first wife, it is well known, ran away from him within a month after their marriage, ‘disgusted,’ says Phillips, ‘with his spare diet and hard study,’ and his later domestic misery is universally known.” “The poet Young, with all his parade of domestic sorrows, was, it appears, a neglectful husband and a harsh father.” Sir Walter Scott remarks, in his _Life of Dryden_: “The wife of one who is to gain his livelihood by poetry, or by any labour (if any there be) equally exhausting, must either have taste enough to relish her husband’s performances, or good-nature sufficiently to pardon his infirmities. It was Dryden’s misfortune that Lady Elizabeth had neither the one nor the other; and I dismiss the disagreeable subject by observing, that on no one occasion when a sarcasm against matrimony could be introduced, has our author failed to season it with such bitterness, as spoke of an inward consciousness of domestic misery.” Richard Wagner when a young man married an actress, “pretty as a picture”; but she appears to have had little sympathy with his ambitions, so he lived apart from her. Subsequently he was very happy with Cosima, the daughter of Liszt, who _did_ appreciate his genius. Liszt himself, after living some years with the Countess D’Agoult in Italy, separated from her. The girl whom Haydn married soon turned out a shrew, who had no sympathy whatever with his musical genius. Berlioz was one of the most passionate of lovers: “Oh, that I could find her, the Juliet, the Ophelia that my heart calls to. That I could drink in the intoxication of that mingled joy and sadness that only true love knows! Could I but rest in her arms one autumn evening, rocked by the north wind on some wild heath, and sleeping my last, sad sleep.” A few years after these rapturous effusions he arranged a _séparation à l’aimable_ from his wife, his former flame, and left her to die in solitude and misery.