stood naturally a better chance of being adopted as the favourites of his imagination, and of sharing, in consequence, a portion of that bright colouring reserved for all that gave it interest and pleasure.  Next to the dead, therefore, whose hold upon his fancy had been placed beyond all risk of severance, those friends whom he but saw occasionally, and by such favourable glimpses as only renewed the first kindly impression they had made, were the surest to live unchangingly, and without shadow, in his memory.

To this same cause, there is little doubt, his love for his sister owed much of its devotedness and fervour.  In a mind sensitive and versatile as his, long habits of family intercourse might have estranged, or at least dulled, his natural affection for her;—­but their separation, during youth, left this feeling fresh and untried.[56] His very inexperience in such ties made the smile of a sister no less a novelty than a charm to him; and before the first gloss of this newly awakened sentiment had time to wear off, they were again separated, and for ever.

If the portrait which I have here attempted of the general character of those gifted with high genius be allowed to bear, in any of its features, a resemblance to the originals, it can no longer, I think, be matter of question whether a class so set apart from the track of ordinary life, so removed, by their very elevation, out of the influences of our common atmosphere, are at all likely to furnish tractable subjects for that most trying of all social experiments, matrimony.  In reviewing the great names of philosophy and science, we shall find that all who have most distinguished themselves in those walks have, at least, virtually admitted their own unfitness for the marriage tie by remaining in celibacy;—­Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, Boyle, Hume, and a long list of other illustrious sages, having all led single lives.[57]

The poetic race, it is true, from the greater susceptibility of their imaginations, have more frequently fallen into the ever ready snare.  But the fate of the poets in matrimony has but justified the caution of the philosophers.  While the latter have given warning to genius by keeping free of the yoke, the others have still more effectually done so by their misery under it;—­the annals of this sensitive race having, at all times, abounded with proofs, that genius ranks but low among the elements of social happiness,—­that, in general, the brighter the gift, the more disturbing its influence, and that in married life particularly, its effects have been too often like that of the “Wormwood Star,” whose light filled the waters on which it fell with bitterness.