Revisiting the Earth

by James Langdon Hill

In waking hours, in reveries, and in dreams, pictures had been painted on the fancy, and now the lenses were given, through which they could be viewed. A vague and indistinct idea had now taken a form. It was very unromantic, but it seemed the expression of an intuition. It was like an acquaintance, accidentally met at the way-side. There seemed to be a susceptibility hid away, hitherto kept dormant, that the slightest cause seemed to magnetize.

Cupid's Marksmanship

However this may be, there is such instinctive insight in the human heart, that we often form our opinion, almost instantaneously, and such impressions seldom change and they are not often wrong. To notice anything, so casual, sounds like an imprudence and yet it is almost a revelation. It seems as if we were but renewing the relations of a previous existence. Some one, from this, goes on to inquire, What will the doubters of impressions do with a fact like this? Almost everyone has experienced something similar. In this house, we often speak of our instant meeting, our introduction, and the destinies which were made to swing on such a chance acquaintance. It wanted not a word, not a hint, for within was the consciousness of what was to be. The problem was solved. My foreshadowing was realized. If a person is looking for a lesson in Providence, here it is. I could plainly see how I had been led along. "Come live with me." The irrevocable yoke of life was on us. The mysteries of Providence are felt in the coincidence of two paths over surfaces so widely apart. We are astounded at this miracle of meeting. A breath, a lifting of the hand, an inconceivably small intervention would have diverted the attention of either of us. There, too, is the miracle of hinging so much of destiny and of happiness on so small an occasion, that might easily have been no occasion at all. It is like taking letters out of the alphabet. The art is in placing them side by side in such a way as to make words. Use no skill of location and the arrangement into which they have fallen is inappropriate and unfortunate. Standing apart the letters are meaningless. Jumbled or jarred together the chances are very much against their having any significance, but when brought to their final position, by what they spell together, they are read of all men with approbation. The first time that Mr. Paul R. George of Concord, N. H., met the young lady that became his wife he felt a little click in the neighborhood of his heart. Now about this "click" to which so many persons bear witness. Men are great imitators. They follow a crowd. But a hit duck flutters the water. It is like the late selective draft: a man is touched; he attempts no evasion; he knows he was selected and comes promptly forward and puts on the uniform. The way the mind receives this impress, is noticeable in the further fact that if Paul R. George had been abroad, and the meeting had been so casual that he received no introduction, it would have been permanent just the same. The heart never loses anything. Touch the right string later and the impression is sure to be reproduced. All that is peculiar about Mr. George's case is his confession. We know that matrimony is either heaven-made or done in purgatory. The issue seems too important to turn once for all on the original early choice of an inexperienced person. An individual is not thus forced to choose once for all in determining what college he will take. He may choose Williams and change to Dartmouth. Nor is it an unchangeable choice on entering business. He may begin with law and change to politics or he may incline to manufacturing and take to banking. If, however, he enters the matrimonial field, having put his hand to the plow, there is no turning around nor looking back.

Remember Lot's Wife

There are, however, some good rules for an individual to follow. One, for example, would be, to take a girl that was a favorite with other girls. Another to be uninfluenced in your choice by dowry. The question before the house is matrimony, not money making. Acquire lucre by another process. Too much is at stake to be moved now by thirty pieces of silver. The young man was worthy of all admiration who on his wedding trip asked the bride how much of a dot she had left after paying for her trousseau. She said, "Half a dollar." "Well," he said, "heave it over into the canal and let us make an even start." I can better understand how a girl could be induced to shy a silver coin into the canal than how she could be reconciled to parting with such a name as she sometimes must drop. Here is a girl just reported engaged to a soldier. Her name was Priscilla Weymouth Alden, which tells not only her illustrious descent but in just what locality, in the old colony, her branch of the family made its distinguished nest. In this country the wife or maiden invariably walks by the side of her male companion and never follows after him in Indian file, like geese returning from pasture. It is against nature for a man to say "my house" or my this or that. He should be unable to pronounce the word. In this house our account at the bank is open for either to check upon. Our exchequer, on the one hand, or our politics on the other, are a joint affair. The family is the unit. When Bunker Hill monument was still incomplete interest flagged. Money was gone. Work came to a full period. An appeal was made to the women of the land to hold a great fair to obtain the wherewithal so that the builder should bring forth the headstone thereof with shoutings, crying Grace, grace, unto it. Subscriptions and contributions hurried to its aid from every section and it rose to "meet the sun in his coming," "to be the last object on the sight of him who leaves his native shore and the first to gladden his who revisits it." It is not good for man to work alone. The house in which a man is married seems to him odd.

The Supply is Not Exhausted

Bridgewater is a belle among residential communities. The best place in this country or in any other to raise girls. The street is attractive. The house fine, yet it seems distinct, different. I think most men feel so about the house in which they were married. In all other shrines I had made a home. Isaac blessed Jacob and sent him away to Padan-Aram to take a wife from thence, and God appeared unto Jacob again when he came out of Padan-Aram and blessed him. Under similar conditions the Duke of Buckingham dropped his purse so that the person finding it might feel that nothing but good fortune attends the visit to a home like that. I used to like to go there, yet I had to do, every day, the full work of an adult at home, and so it became plain that I would get along better if I could locate both of my interests in the same place. In speaking of weddings much is said with truth about "the negligible groom." I could not long live on angel cake and so I had to turn abruptly to face the prosier plain bread and butter question; so when the bird was caught and caged I took up the inquiries, What shall we eat and wherewithal shall we be clothed? It is a merciful provision that this latter question rests lightly upon the groom for the first decade, as some part of the hat the bride wore to Washington (it being understood that a wedding admits no variation but means either a trip to Washington or Niagara Falls) will reappear as a feature of her headdress with much variation of location during the next ten years.

The place of the wedding is always a conspicuous shrine. On revisiting the earth we were strolling around the streets, quite a number of soldiers were about and were entertaining the girls at a soda fountain, and one of the enlisted men told a pitiful story about swallowing a pin, and when a vivacious young lady expressed alarm and sympathy, "Oh," he said, "no harm could come of it; it was a safety pin."

Heart Histories

We go there often and sit on the stone steps of the old Unitarian church just as we did when we were young and foolish. Times have changed incredibly since the visit to Padan Aram or else a favorite and very accomplished writer just at this writing is all dead wrong in throwing the weight of his great influence against what he calls being "married without capital." This would cut out the wedding of Dr. Joseph Parker of the City Temple, London, the greatest expositor of scripture known to us. "Improvident" is the word his biographer uses "certainly when tested by the maxims of the world. He was twenty-two without having secured a definite position." But marriages are to be judged by their history. Let us hear the eloquent orator himself. He speaks of "Annie, the soul I loved, the girl who saved me and made me a man." His estimate of her varied from the opinion the editor we have quoted would have put upon her. She was gentle, domesticated, cultivated, with a poetic turn of mind, and like Mary of Bethany, religiously meditative. She read widely, being now more assiduous than ever in her Bible studies. Her appetite in this was twofold for her husband and herself. She asked God to bless him and He blessed them both. He was strong, constituted for public life, full of fire, and prepared to take the kingdom of heaven by violence. We feel like questioning Cupid's sanity when he brings together persons of such diverse natures, training, antecedents, and tendencies, but among opposites, in disposition, Cupid displays his best achievements. They took life together as they found it. To have "saved" one of the world's greatest forces, to have "made him a man" was more than an equivalent for living on short commons for some few weeks while they were getting under way. Working out good fortune together is great happiness to many young people who know each other well and without reservation believe in each other and in their future. A young man graduating or entering a business life must make his capital before he can share it. There is much to be said in favor of what many healthy spirited girls achieve when their affections are satisfied. Adam was asleep when he chose his wife and this is one reason why things proved so out of joint. The strong dissuasive to become "married without capital" would have borne heavily upon Peter H. Burnett when a clerk in a country store on two hundred dollars a year, less than four dollars a week beside his board.