ALL AND ALWAYS

True love will brook no common share
In what she holds the dearest;
No less can satisfy her prayer
Than declaration clearest-
All and always.

For less than all may mean reserve,
Perchance for other lover;

While less than always can not serve
Expected life to cover-

All and always.

True love keeps naught in thought or pelf
From consideration tender;

She lays down life, and flings herself
In absolute surrender—

All and always.

And love demands a like return

From her accepting wooer;

She thinks the flame of love must burn

In splendor ever truer—

All and always.

LOVE'S RICHEST OUTLAY

The richest outlay that Love can make is in a happy marriage. In no other relation can it exert its force with so much benefit to all concerned.

Marriage is not merely a union between two creatures-it is a union between two spirits, and its design is to perfect the nature of both, and to populate the world with other spirits equally perfect.

In this union Love finds its best chance to develop excellence of character, strength of moral will, sympathy, tenderness, and all those lovely graces and traits which make life worth living both for self and others.

Marriage has been called "the bloom or blight of all men's happiness." Love, or the want of it, makes it so. Without love, marriage is a perpetual degradation and a living death; with it, marriage is a constant inspiration and a glorious life.

"The institution of marriage," says Timothy Dwight, "keeps the moral world in being, and secures it from an untimely dissolution. Without it natural affection and amiableness would not exist, domestic education would become extinct, industry and economy be unknown, and man would be left to the precarious existence of the savage. But for this institution, learning and refinement would expire, government sink into the gulf of anarchy, and religion, hunted from the earth, would hasten back to her native heaven.”

Marriage makes home. Home is the nation's unit and its recruiting shrine. Patriotism, or love of country, thrives most when family love reaches its perfect stages.

Man reaches his highest point of perfection in the bracing atmosphere of a love-blest home. Warmed and cheered by a wise woman's affection, his hidden comforts become more precious than the gold of the mountains or the treasures of the deep.

"What greater thing is there," inquires George Eliot, "for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life-to

strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?"

LOVE AND LONGING

He's far away, the idol of my heart,

And night and day, in dream and waking thought,

I long for him with longing inexpressible.

It is a longing that amounts to pain;

Yet sweeter far the longing and the pain

Than stranger be to love.

Sometimes he comes; he names the day
When I his face shall see and hear
The music of his voice. How sweet
The glad anticipation! I count the hours
Until that interview so precious
Becomes reality to me.

O love! O longing love!
My inmost heart is stirred
As by a power akin to the divine.
Outdrawn in force my very soul
Leaps through the realms of space
And clasps in ecstasy and eager haste
The object of my love.

Before mine eyes his image stands.

I view his smile, his arms outstretched

To clasp me to his breast, and, whispering low,
Speak sweetness through my frame.

All else is naught compared with him.

The angel forms that grace the courts of God
And shine in brightness in the streets of gold
Are not the forms I seek.