The history of the race, of its art, of its literature, has borne through ages testimony to the vividness and to the tyranny of this obsession, this mistake, or this truth which may be one of Nature's deepest. For it may be error and it may be truth, or sometimes the one and sometimes the other. It may be one of the vast forces in Nature which we are but now beginning to observe--one of her instincts of intuitive selection which announces itself instantly and is never to be reversed: such an instinct as governs the mating of other lives not human. But there it is in our own species for us to make out of it what we can. There are men who for the rest of their lives look back upon the mere sight of some woman, a solitary brief meeting with her, as though that were their natural and perfect union. There are women who are haunted by the same influence and allegiance to some man--seen once--perhaps never seen at all except in a picture. Among the dreams of humanity about ideal strength, ideal wisdom, ideal justice and charity and friendship, this must be set apart as its dream of ideal love; and as all high and beautiful dreams about human nature are welcome, provided only we never awaken from them, let those who dream thus dream on. But the tragedy of it falls upon those who in actual life practically supplant the imagined. Let Petrarch dream of Laura, let Dante dream of Beatrice, if only the perfections of Laura and Beatrice do not come into judgment against the actual wives of Petrarchs and Dantes. Let the ideal love of Romeo and Juliet gladden mankind only as a dream of the unfulfilled. Dr. Birney had fallen under the influence of this error, or this truth: the bride of his friend instantly filled his imagination as that vision of perfection which dreams alone bring to visit us. He was not yet in love with her, not a feeling of his nature had yet made its start towards her: but she had declared herself as for him the ideal woman--ensphered in the unattainable. As proof of this she released in him from the hour of his meeting her finer things than he had been aware of in his own nature: her countenance, her form, her voice, her whole presence, her spirit, disclosed for him for the first time the whole glory and splendor of human life and of a man's union with a woman. As he tried to withdraw his mind from this belief and fix it upon his own separate future, he discovered that his outlook was no longer single nor clear. Something stood in his path--an irremovable obstacle. Sometimes in sleep we try to drive around an obstruction in our road, and as often as we drive around it it reappears where it was before: such an obstruction had obtruded itself across his progress.