PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY AND MARY GODWIN


A great deal has been said and written in favor of early marriage;
and, in a general way, early marriage may be an admirable thing.
Young men and young women who have no special gift of imagination,
and who have practically reached their full mental development at
twenty-one or twenty-two--or earlier, even in their teens--may
marry safely; because they are already what they will be. They are
not going to experience any growth upward and outward. Passing
years simply bring them more closely together, until they have
settled down into a sort of domestic unity, by which they think
alike, act alike, and even gradually come to look alike.

But early wedlock spells tragedy to the man or the woman of
genius. In their teens they have only begun to grow. What they
will be ten years hence, no one can prophesy. Therefore, to mate
so early in life is to insure almost certain storm and stress,
and, in the end, domestic wreckage.

As a rule, it is the man, and not the woman, who makes the false
step; because it is the man who elects to marry when he is still
very young. If he choose some ill-fitting, commonplace, and
unresponsive nature to match his own, it is he who is bound in the
course of time to learn his great mistake. When the splendid eagle
shall have got his growth, and shall begin to soar up into the
vault of heaven, the poor little barn-yard fowl that he once
believed to be his equal seems very far away in everything. He
discovers that she is quite unable to follow him in his towering