withers and dies. The love that is fed with presents always requires feeding. Love, and love only, is the loan for love. Love is of the nature of a burning glass, which, kept still in one place, fireth; changed often, it doth nothing. The purest joy we can experience in one we love, is to see that person a source of happiness to others. When you are with the person loved, you have no sense of being bored. This humble and trivial circumstance is the great test-the only sure and abiding test of love. With the persons you do not love you are never supremely at your ease. You have some of the sensation of walking upon stilts.

versation with them, however much you admire them and are interested in them, the horrid idea will cross your mind of "What shall I say next?" One has well said, "In true love the burden of conversation is borne by both the lovers, and the one of them who, with knightly intent, would bear it alone, would only thus cheat the other of a part of his best fortune." When two souls come together, each seeking to magnify the other, each in a subordinate sense worshiping the other, each helps the other; the two flying together so that each wing-beat of the one helps each wing-beat of the other-when two souls come together thus, they are lovers. They who unitedly move themselves away from grossness and from earth, toward the throne crystaline and the pavement golden, are, indeed, true lovers.

Matrimony.

It is pleasant to contemplate the associations clustering around the wedding morn. It is the happiest hour of human life, and breaks upon the young heart like a gentle spring upon the flowers of earth. It is the hour of bounding, joyous expectancy, when the ardent spirit, arming itself with bold hope, looks with undaunted mien upon the dark and terrible future. It is the hour when thought borrows the livery of good. ness, and humanity looking from its tenement, across the broad common of life, shakes off its heavy load of sordidness, and gladly swings to its shoulders the light burden of love and kindness. It is the heart's hour, full of blissful contemplation, rich promises, and the soul's happy revels. We cordially echo the sentiment, "Happy morn, garmented with the human virtues, it shows life to the eye, lovely, as if

"Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars."

Marriage has in it less of beauty, but more of safety than the single life; it hath no more ease, but less danger; it is more merry and more sad; it is fuller of sorrows and fuller of joys; it lies under more burdens, but it is supported by all the strengths of love and charity, and those burdens are delightful. Marriage is the mother of the world, and preserves kingdoms, and fills cities and churches, and heaven itself. Celibacy, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and

dies in singularity; but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, and gathers honey from every flower, and labors, and unites into societies and republics, and sends out colonies, and feeds the world with delicacies, and obeys its king, and keeps order, and exercises many virtues, and promotes the interests of mankind, and is that state of good to which God hath designed the present constitution of the world.

"Marriage is a lottery," the saying goes, and there are plenty who believe it, and who act accordingly, and for such it is well if they do no worse than draw a blank, if they do not draw a life-long misery and pain. But marriage is not necessarily a lottery, either in the initial choice or in the months and years after the marriage day: One can shut his eyes and draw, or one can open them and choose. One can choose with the outward eye alone, or with the eye of intellect and conscience. Says Jeremy Taylor, speaking of marriages where physical beauty is the only bond: "It is an ill band of affections to tie two hearts together with a little thread of red and white." But let us choose ever so wisely, ever so deeply, and not we ourselves nor the minister can marry us completely on the wedding day. "A happy wedlock is a long falling in love." Marriage is very gradual, a fraction

of us at a time. And the real ministers that marry people are the slow years, the joys and sorrows which they bring, our children on earth and the angels they are transfigured into in heaven, the toils and burdens borne in company. These are the ministers that really marry us, and compared with these, the ministers who

3

go through a form of words some day, when heaven and earth seem to draw near and kiss each other, are of small account. And the real marriage service isn't anything printed or said; it is the true heart service which each yields to the other, year in and year out, when the bridal wreath has long since faded, and even the marriage ring is getting sadly worn. Let this service be performed, and even if the marriage was a lottery to begin with, this would go far to redeem it and make it a marriage of coequal hearts and minds.

When the honeymoon passes away, setting behind dull mountains, or dipping silently into the stormy sea of life, the trying hour of married life has come. Between the parties there are no more illusions. The feverish desire for possession has gone, and all excitement receded. Then begins, or should, the business of adaptation. If they find that they do not love one another as they thought they did, they should double their assiduous attentions to one another, and be jealous of everything which tends in the slightest way to sepa rate them. Life is too precious to be thrown away in secret regrets or open differences. And let me say to every one to whom the romance of life has fled, and who are discontented in the slightest degree with their conditions and relations, begin this reconciliation at once. Renew the attentions of earlier days. Draw your hearts closer together. Talk the thing all over. Acknowledge your faults to one another, and determine that henceforth you will be all in all to each other; and my word for it, you shall find in your relation the sweetest joy earth has for you. There is no other way

for you to do. If you are happy at home, you must be happy abroad; the man or woman who has settled down upon the conviction that he or she is attached for life to an uncongenial yoke-fellow, and that there is no way of escape, has lost life; there is no effort too costly to make which can restore to its setting upon the bosom the missing pearl.

It is a great thing for two frail natures to live as one for life long. Two harps are not easily kept always in tune, and what shall we expect of two harps each of a thousand strings? What human will or wisdom cannot do, God can do, and his Providence is uniting ever more intimately, those who devoutly try to do the work of life and enjoy its goods together. For them there is in store a respect and affection; a peace and power all unknown in the hey-day of young romance. Expe rience intertwines their remembrances and hopes in stronger cords, and as they stand at the loom of time, one with the strong warp, the other with the finer woof, the hand of Providence weaves for them a tissue of unfading beauty and imperishable worth.

The marriage institution is the bond of social order, and, if treated with due respect, care, and discretion, greatly enhances individual happiness, and consequently general good. The Spartan law punished those who did not marry; those who married too late; and those who married improperly. A large portion of the evils that have defaced the original organization of the patriarchal age, have resulted from the increase of celibacy, often caused by the imaginary refinements of the upper ten thousand. There are other causes that