Soulmates

As I age, I become more and more convinced that for most, there is but one soulmate, and often that soulmate is one of unrequited love, and often a mutual understanding and acceptance of that "unrequited love."

For Henry James, it was Constance Fenimore Woolson.

Michael Gorra writes of this in his Portrait of a Novel. It is a poignant story, and so well told in chapter 15. The chapter ends with her resting place:

... in Rome, where Woolson lies, as she wished, in the city's Protestant Cemetery. James visited her each time he returned to the capital, and perhaps in doing so he recognized that she rests near the spot where he had put his own Daisy Miller; Daisy, who would "have appreciated one's esteem." Keats is buried in the older and relatively open part of the graveyard, where the tombs are widely spaced, and the city's cats can spread themselves on the warm rocks in the sun. 

Woolson can be found in the newer and more crowded section, its walkways laid out as precisely as a grid of city streets. But her company looks good. Shelley is close by -- .... -- and her stone is but two steps away from that of John Addington Symonds, whose life had so curiously crossed both James's and her own. William Wetmore Story lies near as well, and then many other names of the kind that provide the footnotes of nineteenth-century culture. 

This reminds me of Authors Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Massachusetts.

I also feel that men become more romantic with age; women, more pragmatic and realistic. But that's another post for another time and place.