CHAPTER XXVII.
LOVE SURVIVING MARRIAGE.

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:

CHAPTER XXVIII.
"HE WILL NOT SEPARATE US, WE HAVE BEEN SO HAPPY."

"He will not separate us, we have been so happy"—these were the last words of Charlotte Brontë when, having become Mrs. Nicholls, and having lived with her husband only nine months, death came to snatch the cup of domestic felicity from the lips of the happy pair. A low wandering delirium came on. Wakening for an instant from this stupor, she saw her husband's woe-worn face, and caught the sound of some murmured words of prayer that God would spare her. "Oh!" she whispered, "I am not going to die, am I? He will not separate us, we have been so happy."

Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, when a girl, loved her family so dearly that she used to wish that when they had to die, two large walls might press towards each other, and crush them all, that they might die all together, and be spared the misery of parting. Loving husbands and wives will sympathize with this wish, for they must sometimes look forward with dread to the misery of parting from each other.

"To know, to esteem, to love—and then to part,
Makes up life's tale to many a feeling heart!"

In all ages the anticipation and the reality of separation has been the greatest and sometimes the only sorrow in the lot of united couples. Many very touching inscriptions have been found in the Catacombs at Rome, but none more touching than those which record this separation. Here is one of them. It is in memory of a very young wife, who must have been married when little more than a child (fourteen), and then left by her husband, a soldier, called off probably to serve in the provinces. He returns to find his poor little wife dead. Was she martyred or did she fret herself to death, or was she carried off with malaria in the Catacombs? We know nothing; but here is her epitaph full of simple pathos, and warm as with the very life blood: "To Domina, 375 A.D., my sweetest and most innocent wife, who lived sixteen years and four months, and was married two years, with whom I was not able to live more than six months, during which time I showed her my love as I felt it; none else so loved each other." When Sir Albert Morton died, his wife's grief was such that she shortly followed him, and was laid by his side. Wotton's two lines on the event have been celebrated as containing a volume in seventeen words:

"He first deceased; she for a little tried
To live without him, liked it not, and died."

When Colonel Hutchinson, the noble Commonwealth officer, felt himself dying, knowing the deep sorrow which his death would occasion to his wife, he left this message, which was conveyed to her: "Let her, as she is above other women, show herself on this occasion a good Christian, and above the pitch of ordinary women." Faithful to his injunction, instead of lamenting his loss, she indulged her sorrow in depicting her husband as he had lived. "They who dote on mortal excellences," she says, in her Introduction to the "Life," "when, by the inevitable fate of all things frail, their adored idols are taken from them, may let loose the winds of passion to bring in a flood of sorrow, whose ebbing tides carry away the dear memory of what they have lost; and when comfort is essayed to such mourners, commonly all objects are removed out of their view which may with their remembrance renew the grief; and in time these remedies succeed, and oblivion's curtain is by degrees drawn over the dead face; and things less lovely are liked, while they are not viewed together with that which was most excellent. But I, that am under a command not to grieve at the common rate of desolate women, while I am studying which way to moderate my woe, and if it were possible to augment my love, I can for the present find out none more just to your dear father, nor consolatory to myself, than the preservation of his memory, which I need not gild with such flattering commendations as hired preachers do equally give to the truly and titularly honourable. A naked undressed narrative, speaking the simple truth of him, will deck him with more substantial glory than all the panegyrics the best pens could ever consecrate to the virtues of the best men."

When death removed Stella from Swift, and he was left alone to think of what he had lost, he described her as "the truest, most virtuous, and valuable friend, that I, or perhaps any other person, was ever blessed with." Henceforward he must strive and suffer alone. The tenderness, of which his attachment to Stella had been the strongest symptom, deeply as it had struck its roots into his nature, withered into cynicism. But a lock of Stella's hair is said to have been found in Swift's desk, when his own fight was ended, and on the paper in which it was wrapped were written words that have become proverbial for the burden of pathos that their forced brevity seems to hide—"Only a woman's hair." It is for each reader to read his own meaning into them.

Dr. Johnson's wife was querulous, exacting, old, and the reverse of beautiful, and yet a considerable time after her death he said that ever since the sad event he seemed to himself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wild of life, without any direction or fixed point of view; a gloomy gazer on the world to which he had little relation. After recording some good resolution in his Journal he was in the habit since her death of writing after it his wife's name—"Tetty." It is only a word; but how eloquent it is! When a certain Mr. Edwards asked him if he had ever known what it was to have a wife, Johnson replied: "Sir, I have known what it was to have a wife, and (in a solemn, tender, faltering tone) I have known what it was to lose a wife. I had almost broke my heart." Nor did he allow himself to forget this experience. To New Year's Day, Good Friday, Easter Day, and his own birthday, which he set apart as sacred days dedicated to solemn thought and high communion with his own soul, he added the day of his wife's death.

Nor are such separations less felt in humble life. A year or two ago the newspapers in describing a colliery accident related that upon the tin water-bottle of one of the dead men brought out of the Seaham Pit, there was scratched, evidently with a nail, the following letter to his wife: "Dear Margaret,—There was forty of us altogether at 7 A.M., some was singing hymns, but my thought was on my little Michael. I thought that him and I would meet in heaven at the same time. Oh, dear wife, God save you and the children, and pray for myself. Dear wife, farewell. My last thoughts are about you and the children. Be sure and learn the children to pray for me. Oh, what a terrible position we are in.—Michael Smith, 54, Henry Street." The little Michael he refers to was his child whom he had left at home ill. The lad died on the day of the explosion.

A writer on The Orkneys and Shetland tells the following. A native of Hoy went one day to his minister and said, "Oh! sir, but the ways of Providence are wonderful! I thought I had met with a sair misfortune when I lost baith my coo and my wife at aince over the cliff, twa months sin; but I gaed over to Graemsay, and I hae gotten a far better coo and a far bonnier wife."

That a wife is not always so easily replaced is evident from the following letter which appeared in the Belfast papers: "Sir,—I request permission to inform your readers of the fair sex that I have just received a letter from a young man residing in a rapidly-rising town of a few months' growth, and terminus of several railways, in one of the Western States of America, telling me that he has lost his wife, and would wish to get another one—a nice little Irish girl, just like the other one; that she should be 'between twenty and twenty-five years of age, of good habits, of good forme, vertchaus, and a Protestant.' My correspondent, who is a perfect stranger to me, informs me that he is 28 years of age, and 'ways' 150 lbs.; that he is a carpenter by trade, and owns a farm of 65 acres, and that he can give the best of references. I am writing to him for his references and his photograph, and also for a photograph and description of his late wife, on receipt of which I will address you again.—Vere Foster, Belfast, Jan. 5, 1883."

This poor, uneducated carpenter was so happy with his nice little Irish girl that when taken from him he could not help trying to get another one just like her, and sends more than three thousand miles for a chip of the old block. If any blame him for seeking for a second wife let them reflect on the awful solitude of a backwoods settlement when the prairie flower represented by a nice little Irish girl had faded and died. By desiring to marry again he paid the highest compliment to his first wife, for he showed that she had made him a happy man.

It is sometimes said that the happiest days of a man's life is the day of his wedding and the day of his wife's funeral. And the Quarterly Review, in an article on Church Bells, related that one Thomas Nash in 1813 bequeathed fifty pounds a year to the ringers of the Abbey Church at Westminster, "on condition of their ringing on the whole peal of bells, with clappers muffled, various solemn and doleful changes on the 14th of May in every year, being the anniversary of my wedding-day; and also on the anniversary of my decease to ring a grand bob-major, and merry, mirthful peals, unmuffled, in joyful commemoration of my happy release from domestic tyranny and wretchedness."

As a rule, however, no matter how much a husband and wife have tormented each other the separation when it comes is very painful. How true to life is Trollope's description of the effect of Mrs. Proudie's death upon the bishop. "A wonderful silence had come upon him which for the time almost crushed him. He would never hear that well-known voice again! He was free now. Even in his misery—for he was very miserable—he could not refrain from telling himself that. No one could now press uncalled for into his study, contradict him in the presence of those before whom he was bound to be authoritative, and rob him of all his dignity. There was no one else of whom he was afraid. She had at least kept him out of the hands of other tyrants. He was now his own master, and there was a feeling—I may not call it of relief, for as yet there was more of pain in it than of satisfaction—a feeling as though he had escaped from an old trouble at a terrible cost, of which he could not as yet calculate the amount.... She had in some ways, and at certain periods of his life, been very good to him. She had kept his money for him and made things go straight when they had been poor. His interests had always been her interests. Without her he would never have been a bishop. So, at least, he told himself now, and so told himself probably with truth. She had been very careful of his children. She had never been idle. She had never been fond of pleasure. She had neglected no acknowledged duty. He did not doubt that she was now on her way to heaven. He took his hands down from his head, and clasping them together, said a little prayer. It may be doubted, whether he quite knew for what he was praying. The idea of praying for her soul, now that she was dead, would have scandalized him. He certainly was not praying for his own soul. I think he was praying that God might save him from being glad that his wife was dead.... But yet his thoughts were very tender to her. Nothing reopens the springs of love so fully as absence, and no absence so thoroughly as that which must needs be endless. We want that which we have not; and especially that which we can never have. She had told him in the very last moments of her presence with him that he was wishing that she were dead, and he had made her no reply. At the moment he had felt, with savage anger, that such was his wish. Her words had now come to pass, and he was a widower; and he assured himself that he would give all that he possessed in the world to bring her back again."

Richard Cobden once asked in reference to a famous and successful but unscrupulous statesman, "How will it be with him when all is retrospect?" Husband and wife, how will it be when death has separated you, and your married life is retrospect?

Many a man or woman, going on from day to day in the faithful performance of duty, without any sweet token of approval to cheer the sometimes weary path, would find it act as the very wine of life could he or she only hear by anticipation some few of the passionate words of appreciation or regret that will be spoken when the faithful heart, stilled for ever, can no longer be moved by the tone of loving commendation. Do not in this way let us keep all the good hermetically sealed up till the supreme touch of death shall force it open.

"Alas! how often at our hearths we see—
And by our side—angels about to be!"

But somehow the selfish absorption of life acts as a soporific to our truer sense, and our "eyes are holden that we do not know them," until, alas! it is too late, and they have "passed out of our sight."

"The grave buries every error, covers every defect, extinguishes every resentment. From its peaceful bosom spring none but fond regrets and tender recollections. Who can look down upon the grave of an enemy and not feel a compunctious throb that he should have warred with the poor handful of dust that lies mouldering before him?" If the love that is lavished on the graves of dead friends were bestowed on living darlings in equal measure, family life would be a different thing from what it sometimes is.

As George IV. put on the statue of George III. "pater optimus," best of fathers, though he had embittered his father's life, so many a husband tries to relieve his remorse by extravagantly praising the wife who when alive never received any kindness from him. What is hell but truths known too late? and the surviving one of a married pair has to the end of life, if duty in matrimony has been neglected, the incessant wish that something were otherwise than it had been. The one regret to avoid is, that when married life is over, over for ever, to the survivor should come the unutterable but saddening thought, that now, in the late autumn of life, when experience can be no longer of any possible value, he or she understands, at last understands, all that the chivalry of holy matrimony implies and claims on both sides, in manly forbearance, in delicate thoughtfulness, in loving courtesy. Too late now!

Over the triple doorways of the cathedral of Milan there are three inscriptions spanning the splendid arches. Over one is carved a beautiful wreath of roses, and underneath is the legend "All that which pleases is only for a moment." Over the other is a sculptured cross, and there are the words, "All that which troubles is but for a moment." Underneath the great central entrance in the main aisle is the inscription, "That only is which is eternal." Make the most of the happiness of your marriage, and the least of its vexations, for it is a relation that will not last long.

Respice finem, the old monks used to say in their meditations on life. And if we would behave rightly in married life we must "consider the end." Affections are never deepened and refined until the possibility of loss is felt. "Whatsoever thou takest in hand, remember the end, and thou shalt never do amiss." Spare all hard words, omit all slights, for before long there will be a hearse standing at your door that will take away the best friend that you have on earth—a good wife. Then the silence will be appalling; the vacancies ghastly. Reminiscences will rush on the heart like a mountain current over which a cloud has burst. Her jewels, her books, her pictures, her dresses will be put into a trunk and the lid will come down with a heavy thud, as much as to say—"Dead! The morning dead. The night dead. The world dead." Oh! man, if in that hour you think of any unkind word uttered, you will be willing to pay in red coin of blood every drop from your heart, if you could buy it back. Kindly words, sympathizing attentions, watchfulness against wounding the sensitiveness of a wife or husband—it is the omission of these things which is irreparable: irreparable, when we look to the purest enjoyment which might have been our own; irreparable when we consider the compunction which belongs to deeds of love not done.

Carlyle never meant to be unkind to his wife, but in his late years he thought that he had sacrificed her health and happiness in his absorption in his work; that he had been negligent, inconsiderate, and selfish. "For many years after she had left him," writes Mr. Froude, "when he passed the spot where she was last seen alive, he would bare his grey head in the wind and rain—his features wrung with unavailing sorrow. 'Oh!' he often said to me, 'if I could but see her for five minutes to assure her that I had really cared for her throughout all that! But she never knew it, she never knew it!'"

Sorrow, however, may teach us wisdom, and if we study patience in the school of Christ much comfort will from thence be derived. And much hope too. He is the resurrection and the life, and if we believe in Him we believe that there is a Friend in whose arms we ourselves shall fall asleep, and to whose love we may trust for the reunion, sooner or later, of the severed links of sacred human affection.

"And in that perfect Marriage Day
All earth's lost love shall live once more;
All lack and loss shall pass away,
And all find all not found before;
Till all the worlds shall live and glow
In that great love's great overflow."

INDEX.