“There’s something of antipathy, as ’twere, Between their present and their future state; A kind of flattery that’s hardly fair Is used until the truth arrives too late-- Yet what can people do, except despair? The same things change their names at such a rate; For instance--passion in a lover’s glorious, But in a husband is pronounced uxorious. VII. “Men grow ashamed of being so very fond; They sometimes also get a little tired (But that, of course, is rare), and then despond; The same things cannot always be admired, Yet ’tis “so nominated in the bond,” That both are tied till one shall have expired. Sad thought! to lose the spouse that was adorning Our days, and put one’s servants into mourning. VIII. “There’s doubtless something in domestic doings, Which forms, in fact, true love’s antithesis; Romances paint at full length people’s wooings, But only give a bust of marriages; For no one cares for matrimonial cooings, There’s nothing wrong in a connubial kiss. Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife, He would have written sonnets all his life?” It is significant that those who most praise marriage are young people who do not know marriage from experience, but have failed to find true happiness in celibacy. We think of the words of Socrates, that it is a matter of indifference whether a man marries or does not marry, for in either case he will regret it. Our own time is certainly characterized by hostility to marriage. It is the =form= of modern marriage which frightens most people; the compulsion which has actually been rendered more stringent by the new Civil Code of 1900. Modern individualism draws back from the undeniable =loss of freedom= which legal marriage entails. The shadow which, according to a saying of E. Dühring, indissoluble marriage has thrown upon love and upon the nobler aspects of the sexual life, is darker to-day than ever before. Hence the growing disinclination to marry, which, significantly enough, is increasingly manifest upon the part of women; hence, above all, the =extraordinary increase in divorce=. According to a statement in the _Vossische Zeitung_ (No. 137, March 22, 1906), the number of divorces in Germany underwent a =marked= increase in the year 1904. In that year there were 10,882 divorces; in 1903, 9,932; in 1902, 9,074; thus in the year 1904 there was an increase of 590, or 9·6 per cent.