of them and they will be far more improving to your mind. They will not
keep you dawdling at home, or dancing attendance upon them; or withdraw you
from the great world and stirring scenes of life and action which would
make a man of you.

In such a manner, turning the seamy side outwards, a modern Socrates might
describe the evils of married and domestic life. They are evils which
mankind in general have agreed to conceal, partly because they are
compensated by greater goods. Socrates or Archilochus would soon have to
sing a palinode for the injustice done to lovely Helen, or some misfortune
worse than blindness might be fall them. Then they would take up their
parable again and say:--that there were two loves, a higher and a lower,
holy and unholy, a love of the mind and a love of the body.

'Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds.

...

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.'

But this true love of the mind cannot exist between two souls, until they
are purified from the grossness of earthly passion: they must pass through
a time of trial and conflict first; in the language of religion they must
be converted or born again. Then they would see the world transformed into
a scene of heavenly beauty; a divine idea would accompany them in all their