their own infant hands. And, on the other hand, it would require a stoical love of virtue for its own sake, to make any youth love the foul, smoky, fenceless cabin of a thriftless father. Sweeten home, and you close nine out of ten doors to temptation. IV. HUSBAND AND WIFE. "Sufficiency, content, Retirement, rural quiet, friendship, books, These are the matchless joys of virtuous love." THOMSON. lr is well known to all readers of fiction, that the novel commonly ends, as soon as the happy pair are united at the altar; and it would be thought a singular romance in which the interest should be made to turn mainly upon the pleasures of married life. But whatever it may be in fiction, wedlock is the source of the richest happiness in real life. Its joys indeed are not of the sort which the novelist loves to dwell on; they are less like the lightning or the meteor than the sunset or the dawn. They are not the raptures of the lover, which are often founded in mere sense, and vanish when youth and beauty are gone; but the steady glow of a true love that outlasts every external charm, and holds on its constant light even amidst wrinkles and old age. Trite as the subject is, I must be allowed to spend a little time upon it, as it is nearly connected with the happiness of the working-man's home. What is life, especially to the artisan, without home? and what is home, without gentle woman, the friend, the wife, the mother? The English nobleman, and those who ape his manners, may trample on these domestic pleasures; but it is like ▲ treading down the lily of the valley, the cowslip, and the violet. Husband and wife, in high life, may affect great coldness, live apart, maintain separate equipages, and flaunt at different watering-places; they have debauched all taste for the joys of nature and of virtue: but husband and wife, in our happier sphere, are necessary to one another, and cannot be severed without loss and anguish. In our favoured land there can scarcely be said to be any check to marriage. Our young people marry early, and are free from that sullen, brooding prudence which is inculcated by painful necessity on the peasantry of the old country. Matrimony is therefore more an affair of the heart; and this, in spite of all sneers at lovemarriages, I shall ever hold to be a great advantage. What was said on this subject by Franklin, seventy years ago, is still true, that early marriages stand the best chance of happiness. The temper and habits are plastic and easily run together; the want of personal experience is supplied by that of elder friends who still survive. "Late children," says the Spanish proverb, "are early orphans." "With us in America," Dr. Franklin wrote in 1768, "marriages are generally in the morning of life; our children are therefore educated and settled in the world by noon; and thus, our business being done, we have an afternoon and evening of cheerful leisure to ourselves. By these early marriages we are blessed with more children; ****** hence the swift progress of population among us, unparalleled in Europe." Profane jesters and rakes have succeeded in getting afloat in society too many idle and wicked sayings about the state of matrimony. It is a truth at once of Scripture and observation, that "he that findeth a wife, findeth a good thing, and obtaineth favour of the Lord." I am so far from having any fears of infusing into my readers unduly romantic notions in regard to marriage, that I am convinced the households of our working-men would be invested with a new charm if the mutual regards of husband and wife could be hallowed with more of these tender, respectful, and sacred sentiments. Poor Sedley! what I have just written brings him to my mind. Though what the world would call but a common man, he had a heart worthy of a knight-errant. He is now gone; but I am sure there is many a woman living who remembers the chaste but tender respect, almost passionate, if it had not been almost courtly, with which he regarded the sex. And as for Isabel his wife, though at the time I mean she was neither beautiful nor young, she seemed in Sedley's eyes to be the representative of all the virtues. I never heard from them a fondling expression, or observed the slightest indication of that conjugal mellowness which is a sort of perpetuated honey-moon. But then respect and love breathed from every action. Once I found him, when much enfeebled by disease, so much affected as to be in tears. 66 "I am an unlucky fellow," said he, laying his hand on mine; "I have hurt the feelings of my best friend-of Isabel. No," said he, "I recall the phrase-it is often but another name for angerand anger never rested in her gentle bosom. Grief-grief-that is the word: I have grieved her. By my sullenness and petulance, the fruit of my diseases, but yet unpardonable, I have grieved her. And I must go," he exclaimed, "and ask her forgiveness, for in fifteen years she has never given me a look of unkindness." It was with difficulty that I persuaded him to lay aside this purpose. He could scarcely believe that a needless explanation is always a source of real pain. When I afterwards found that Isabel gently smiled at his caprices, which she understood better than himself, I was only the more convinced that "a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband, and that her price is above rubies." Let the debauchee prate of the constraint of wedded love, and the zest he has in licentious pleasure; let the monkish casuist declaim against wedlock as a lower condition in point of morals: I will still repeat the verses of the matchless bard |