end, spring winds will sow disquietude, passing
faces leave a regret behind them, and the whole world keep calling and
calling in their ears. For marriage is like life in this-that it is a
field of battle, and not a bed of roses.

*****

For there is something in marriage so natural and inviting, that the
step has an air of great simplicity and ease; it offers to bury for ever
many aching preoccupations; it is to afford us unfailing and familiar
company through life; it opens up a smiling prospect of the blest
and passive kind of love, rather than the blessing and active; it is
approached not only through the delights of courtship, but by a public
performance and repeated legal signatures. A man naturally thinks it
will go hard within such august circumvallations. And yet there is
probably no other act in a man's life so hot-headed and foolhardy as
this one of marriage.

*****

Again, when you have married your wife, you would think you were got
upon a hilltop, and might begin to go downward by an easy slope. But you
have only ended courting to begin marriage. Falling in love and winning
love are often difficult tasks to overbearing and rebellious spirits;
but to keep in love is also a business of some importance, to which
both man and wife must bring kindness and goodwill. The true love story
commences at the altar, when there lies before the married pair a most
beautiful contest of wisdom and generosity, and a life-long struggle
towards an unattainable ideal. Unattainable? Ay, surely unattainable,
from the very fact that they are two instead of one.

*****

When the generation is gone, when the play is over, when the thirty
years' panorama has been withdrawn in tatters from the stage of the
world, we may ask what has become of these great, weighty, and undying
loves and the sweethearts who despised mortal conditions in a fine
credulity; and they can only show us a few songs in a bygone taste, a
few actions worth remembering, and a few children who have retained some
happy stamp from the disposition of their parents.

*****

Hope looks for unqualified success; but Faith counts certainly on
failure, and takes honourable defeat to be a form of victory. In the
first, he expects an angel for a wife; in the last, he knows that she
is like himself--erring, thoughtless, and untrue; but like himself also,
filled with a struggling radiancy of better things, and adorned with
ineffective qualities. You may safely go t