make a heavenly home.

No affection, save friendship, has any sure eternity in it.
Friendship ought, therefore, always to be cultivated in love itself,
as its only certain guard and preservative, not less than as the only
sufficing substitute in its absence. A couple joined by love without
friendship, walk on gunpowder with torches in their hands. Shall I
venture to depict the sad decay which love naturally suffers, and the
redemptive transformation which it sometimes undergoes? I will do it
by translating a truthful and eloquent passage from Chateaubriand:

"At first our letters are long, vivid, frequent. The day is not
capacious enough for them. We write at sunset; at moonrise we trace a
few more lines, charging its chaste and silent light to hide our
thousand desires. We watch for the first peep of dawn, to write what
we believe we had forgotten to say in the delicious hours of our
meeting. A thousand vows cover the paper, where all the roses of
aurora are reflected; a thousand kisses are planted on the words,
which seem born from the first glance of the sun. Not an idea, an
image, a reverie, an accident, a disquietude, which has not its
letter. Lo! one morning, something almost imperceptible steals on the
beauty of this passion, like the first wrinkle on the front of an
adored woman. The breath and perfume of love expire in these pages of
youth, as an evening breeze dies upon the flowers. We feel it, but
are unwilling to confess it. Our letters become shorter and fewer,
are filled with news, with descriptions, with foreign matters; and,
if any thing happens to delay them, we are less disturbed. On the
subject of loving and being loved, we have grown reasonable. We
submit to absence without complaint. Our former vows prolong
themselves: here are still the same words; but they are dead. Soul is
wanting in them. I love you is merely an expression of habit, a
necessary form, the I have the honor to be of the love letter. Little
by little the style freezes where it inflamed. The post day, no
longer eagerly anticipated, is rather dreaded; writing has become a
fatigue. We blush to think of the madnesses we have trusted to paper,
and wish we could recall our letters and burn them. What has
happened? Is it a new attachment which begins where an old one ends?
No: it is love dying in advance of the object loved. We are forced to
own that the sentiments of man are subjected to the effects of a
hidden process: the fever of tim