n arch; if love be its keystone, it
will stand firmly; it will grow stronger with time. That wanting, it
will crumble in a day. Never should this relation be formed, except with
such sentiments as give reasonable hope of an ever-growing love.

Our natural emotions, on witnessing a marriage without apparent
affection, are painful. If a lady be compelled so to marry, we pity her
doom; if she do it voluntarily, we cannot but feel a disgust at the
connection. Yet how often, could we unveil human hearts, should we see
at the altar, nothing deeper than stratagem, expediency, fancy, or at
best, friendship, as the chief attractive cause. Is it right to complain
ourselves, or should we wonder, at the spectacle of miserable matches in
others, if the temple of marriage rest thus on wood, hay and stubble,
instead of having gold, silver, and precious stones at its base?

"Marrying to increase love," says a writer, "is like gaming to get rich.
You are liable, in the hazard, to lose all you carry to the game." They,
who join hands, with cold hearts, often cease even to respect one
another. They become, in truth, like the pith-ball, in its approach to
the electrified cylinder, the more fiercely repelled, the nearer the
contact. If you do not love the individual you wed, above all his sex;
if nothing more than fancy and friendship draw you toward him, then your
marriage will be indeed a "lottery," and yours may be a blank. Let there
be genuine love, and if alienation afterward occur, it may be overcome
by time and circumstances. Enter this condition in coldness, and strange
will be the exception, if that chill ever be exchanged for a glow.

A true marriage must be Free, contracted by the preference and choice of
the parties. If it be done by constraint, or against the will of either,
it comes short of an union, and is a mere bargain and sale. An offer
may be accepted, simply to gratify a parent or a friend, when the taste
of the lady would have prompted a rejection. The case of Madeline Bray,
in Nickleby, is precisely of this character. She pledged herself a
victim to one whom she did not love, and could not but secretly despise,
and had the marriage been actually consummated, it would have hardly
been a more incongruous, forced, and unnatural connection, than many
which occur in real life. To marry _only_ to please a third person, even
though it be a father, or mother, is never a duty, and can be the result
only of a misled judgment,