LOVE SURVIVING MARRIAGE.
"Thou leanest thy true heart on mine,
And bravely bearest up!
Aye mingling Love's most precious wine
In life's most bitter cup!
And evermore the circling hours
New gifts of glory bring;
We live and love like happy flowers,
All in our fairy ring.
We have known a many sorrows, sweet!
We have wept a many tears,
And after trod with trembling feet
Our pilgrimage of years.
But when our sky grew dark and wild,
All closelier did we cling;
Clouds broke to beauty as you smiled,
Peace crowned our fairy ring."--_Massey._
Marriage is sometimes said to be the door that leads deluded mortals
back to earth; but this need not and ought not to be the case. Writing
to his wife from the sea-side, where he had gone in search of health,
Kingsley said: "This place is perfect; but it seems a dream and
imperfect without you. Blessed be God for the rest, though I never
before felt the loneliness of being without the beloved being whose
every look and word and motion are the key-notes of my life. People talk
of love ending at the altar.... Fools!"
Of course the enthusiastic tempestuous love of courting days will not as
a rule remain. A married couple soon get to feel towards each other very
much as two chums at college, or two partners in a business who are at
the same time old and well-tried friends. Young married people often
think that those who have been in the holy state of matrimony twenty or
thirty years longer than themselves are very prosy, unromantic, and by
no means perfect examples of what married people ought to be. We would
remind persons manifesting this newly-married intolerance of what an old
minister of the Church of Scotland once said to a young Scotch Dissenter
who was finding many faults--"When your lum (chimney) has reeked as long
as ours perhaps it will have as much soot."
"There is real love just as there are real ghosts; every person speaks
of it; few persons have seen it." This cynical remark of Rochefoucauld
is certainly not true in reference to love before marriage and the
existence of love even after it rests on far better evidence than the
existence of ghosts. I have never seen a ghost, but I have seen love
surviving matrimony, and I have read amongst very many other instances
the following.
Old Robert Burton relates several cases of more than lovers' love
existing between husband and wife. He tells us of women who have died to
save their husbands, and of a man who, when his wife was carried away by
Mauritanian pirates, became a galley-slave in order to be near her. Of
a certain Rubenius Celer he says that he "would needs have it engraven
on his tomb that he had led his life with Ennea, his dear wife,
forty-three years and eight months, and never fell out." After
twenty-eight years' experience, Faraday spoke of his marriage as "an
event which more than any other had contributed to his earthly happiness
and healthy state of mind." For forty-six years the union continued
unbroken; the love of the old man remaining as fresh, as earnest, and as
heart-whole, as in the days of his youth. Another man of science, James
Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam-hammer, had a similar happy
experience. "Forty-two years of married life finds us the same devoted
'cronies' that we were at the beginning." Dr. Arnold often dwelt upon
"the rare, the unbroken, the almost awful happiness" of his domestic
life, and carried the first feelings of enthusiastic love and watchful
care through twenty-two years of wedded life.
There are such things as love-letters between married people. Here are
two extracts from one written by Caroline Perthes to her absent husband:
"I have just looked out into the night, and thought of thee. It is a
glorious night, and the stars are glittering above me, and if in thy
carriage one appears to thee brighter than the rest, think that it
showers down upon thee love and kindness from me, and no sadness, for I
am not now unhappy when you are absent. Yet I am certain that this does
not proceed from any diminution of affection. If I could only show how I
feel towards you, it would give you joy. After all I may say or write,
it is still unexpressed, and far short of the living love which I carry
in my heart. If you could apprehend me without words, you would
understand me better. The children do their best, but you are always the
same, and have ever the first place in my heart. Thank God, my Perthes,
neither time nor circumstances can ever affect my love to you; my
affection knows neither youth nor age, and is eternal."
If love never survived matrimony would Mrs. Carlyle have written a
letter like the following which she did to a friend who made a special
effort to console her soon after the death of her mother?--"Only think
of my husband, too, having given me a little present! he who never
attends to such nonsenses as birthdays, and who dislikes nothing in the
world so much as going into a shop to buy anything, even his own
trousers and coats; so that, to the consternation of cockney tailors, I
am obliged to go about them. Well, he actually risked himself in a
jeweller's shop, and bought me a very nice smelling-bottle! I cannot
tell you how _wae_ his little gift made me, as well as glad; it was the
first thing of the kind he ever gave me in his life. In great matters he
is always kind and considerate? but these little attentions, which we
women attach so much importance to, he was never in the habit of
rendering to any one; his up-bringing, and the severe turn of mind he
has from nature, had alike indisposed him towards them. And now the
desire to replace to me the irreplaceable makes him as good in little
things as he used to be in great."
Carlyle never forgot her birthday afterwards. Once she thought that he
had, and she told the story of her mistake and its correction thus: "Oh!
my dear husband, fortune has played me such a cruel trick this day! and
I do not even feel any resentment against fortune for the suffocating
misery of the last two hours. I know always, when I seem to you most
exacting, that whatever happens to me is nothing like so bad as I
deserve. But you shall hear how it was. Not a line from you on my
birthday, the postmistress averred! I did not burst out crying, I did
not faint--did not do anything absurd, so far as I know; but I walked
back again, without speaking a word; and with such a tumult of
wretchedness in my heart as you, who know me, can conceive. And then I
shut myself in my own room to fancy everything that was most tormenting.
Were you, finally, so out of patience with me that you had resolved to
write to me no more at all? Had you gone to Addiscombe, and found no
leisure there to remember my existence? Were you taken ill, so ill that
you could not write? That last idea made me mad to get off to the
railway, and back to London. Oh, mercy! what a two hours I had of it!
And just when I was at my wits' end, I heard Julia crying out through
the house: 'Mrs. Carlyle, Mrs. Carlyle! Are you there? Here is a letter
for you.' And so there was after all! The postmistress had overlooked
it, and had given it to Robert, when he went afterwards, not knowing
that we had been. I wonder what love-letter was ever received with such
thankfulness! Oh, my dear! I am not fit for living in the world with
this organization. I am as much broken to pieces by that little accident
as if I had come through an attack of cholera or typhus fever. I cannot
even steady my hand to write decently. But I felt an irresistible need
of thanking you, by return of post. Yes, I have kissed the dear little
card-case; and now I will lie down awhile, and try to get some sleep. At
least, to quiet myself, I will try to believe--oh, why cannot I believe
it once for all--that, with all my faults and follies, I am 'dearer to
you than any earthly creature.'"
Hundreds of other cases of love surviving matrimony might be cited but
we shall only add one more. On the fifty-fourth anniversary of his
marriage, Mr. S. C. Hall composed the following lines, a copy of which I
had the pleasure of receiving from himself:
"Yes! we go gently down the hill of life,
And thank our God at every step we go;
The husband-lover and the sweetheart-wife.
Of creeping age what do we care or know?
Each says to each, 'Our fourscore years, thrice told,
Would leave us young:' the soul is never old!
What is the grave to us? can it divide
The destiny of two by God made one?
We step across, and reach the other side,
To know our blended life is but begun.
These fading faculties are sent to say
Heaven is more near to-day than yesterday."