FACETIOUS REVENGE OF HERSCHEL, 
319 
deception ! No planet has shown herself more sparing of her 
gifts toward her poor sister than the too susceptible Cardinal 
of Love. 
Herschel has not been able to pardon the earth her moral theo- 
ries against love ; but it is especially in her casts of the vegetable 
kingdom that her ill-humor breaks forth. Herschel has inflicted 
on the Earth a whimsical penance in expiation of her intellectual 
disorders. She has willed that during the whole duration of the 
reign of morality on the Earth, her providences toward the latter 
should be marked with the seal of her political antipathy. Furens 
quid f(Bmina possit I 
For this purpose she has vexatiously travestied all the casts of 
her aromas, and so effectually that the terrestrial emblems of Love 
now only figure in ridiculous masquerade, and it has become ex- 
tremely difficult to divine the hieroglyphics of Love even when 
forewarned of this fact.'^ 
^ Passional appreciation, alas ! is distributed at cross purposes, and that 
spiritual light which reveals the diviner elements of character, and the im- 
personations of the infinite God upon our mortal drama of passion and sor- 
row, flashes only in the Rembrandt or Salvator Rosa effects of light and 
darkness, leaving those who are richest in vision, and from whose hearts 
the angel-kindled torches gleam far out upon the scenery of nature and 
society, often poorest in possession. 
It is chiefly the false demand of an exclusive property in the person, and 
the moral reference of every shade of passional affinity to the marriage 
standard, that vitiates what would be otherwise on either side lovely and 
beautiful in its spontaneity, and without necessarily claiming from its ob- 
ject a return in the same kind, would awaken some other tender or grate- 
ful sentiment, until the circuit of its influence came to embrace both indi- 
rectly and directly all the members of the social or collective man. 
It is with the civilized marriage institution, key-stone of the arch of the 
incoherent order, germ of the isolated household and separated interest, 
that the social battle must be fought. Leave that ; and whatever liberal 
and glorious exceptions individual characters may present, association is 
essentially vitiated, and harmony rendered impossible. Jealousy and 
treachery are but practical synonymes of arbitrary exclusive possession in 
love relations, and these cut the hamstrings of industry in the combined 
order, though perfectly appropriate to the industrial movement of civi- 
lized separate interests. Nature looks ever in her distribution of those in- 
stincts on which sexual unions are founded, to the qualities of the off- 
spring, for whose improved development she seeks in each destined parent 
