The complementary nature of love is a thing which has often been pointed out—how the dark marries the fair, the tall the short, the active the lethargic, and so forth. Schopenhauer, in his _Welt als Wille und Vorstellung_, has made a special study of this subject. Plato, Darwin, and others have alluded to it. It seems as if, in Love, the creature—to use Dante Rossetti’s expression—feels a “poignant thirst and exquisite hunger” for that other one who will supply the elements wanting in himself, who will restore the balance, and fill up the round of the race ideal. And as every one of us is eccentric and out of balance and perfection on one side or another, so it almost seems as if for every one there must be, on the other side, a complementary character to be found—who needs _something_ at any rate of what we can supply. And this consideration may yield us the motto—however painfully conscious we may be of our own weaknesses and deficiencies and follies and vices and general ungainliness—the motto of “Never despair!” Innocent folk, whose studies of this subject have been chiefly perhaps derived from penny novelettes—are sometimes inclined to think that love is a stereotyped affair occurring in a certain pattern and under certain conditions between the ages of 18 and 35; and that if you are not between these ages and are not fortunate enough to have a good complexion and a nicely formed aquiline nose, you may as well abandon hope! They suppose that there is a certain thing called a Man, and another certain thing called a Woman, and that the combination of these two forms a third quite stereotyped thing called Marriage, _and there is an end of it_. But by some kind of Providential arrangement it appears that the actual facts are very different—that there are really hundreds of thousands of different kinds of men, and hundreds of thousands of different kinds of women, and consequently thousands of millions of different kinds of marriage; that there are no limits of grace or comeliness, or of character and accomplishment, or even of infirmity or age, within which love is obliged to move; and that there is no defect, of body or mind, which is of necessity a bar—which may not even (to some special other person) become an object of attraction. Thus it is that the ugly and deformed have no great difficulty in finding their mates—as a visit to the seaside on a bank-holiday speedily convinces us; a squint may be a positive attraction to some, as it is said to have been to the philosopher Descartes, and marks of smallpox indispensable to others;[29] while I have read of a case somewhere, where the man was immediately stirred to romance by the sight of a wooden leg in a woman![30]