The age of romance was over with both of them; yet, for all that, never marriage brought a plainer blessing with it. They began with respect, and ended with steady affection.
The happiest life on earth, Luther used to say, is with a pious, good wife; in peace and quiet, contented with a little, and giving God thanks.
He spoke from his own experience. His Katie, as he called her, was not clever, and he had numerous stories to tell of the beginning of their adventures together.
'The first year of married life is an odd business,' he says. 'At meals, where you used to be alone, you are yourself and somebody else. When you wake in the morning, there are a pair of tails close to you on the pillow. My Katie used to sit with me when I was at work. She thought she ought not to be silent. She did not know what to say, so she would ask me.
'"Herr Doctor, is not the master of the ceremonies in Prussia the brother of the Margrave?"'
She was an odd woman.
'Doctor,' she said to him one day, 'how is it that under Popery we prayed so often and so earnestly, and now our prayers are cold and seldom?'
Katie might have spoken for herself. Luther, to the last, spent hours of every day in prayer. He advised her to read the Bible a little more. She said she had read enough of it, and knew half of it by heart. 'Ah!' he said, 'here begins weariness of the word of God. One day new lights will rise up, and the Scriptures will be despised and be flung away into the corner.'
His relations with his children were singularly beautiful. The recollection of his own boyhood made him especially gentle with them, and their fancies and imaginations delighted him.
Children, to him, were images of unfallen nature. 'Children,' he said, 'imagine heaven a place where rivers run with cream, and trees are hung with cakes and plums. Do not blame them. They are but showing their simple, natural, unquestioning, all-believing faith.'