This sensible young woman introduced another innovation into her wedding. She would not listen to the suggestion of a bridal tour. "I do not want to be stared at and commented on by strangers," she said. "Let us go to some quiet spot in the mountains or by the sea, and let us live with each other and with nature." In after years she often said, "I would not miss from my memory the picture of those happy days for anything that any trip on railway trains and sojourns at hotels could give me. We had time and opportunity to learn each other's souls as we could not have done amid 'the madding crowd;' and we have loved each other more truly, I know, because in those early wedded days we sat with Nature and Nature's God in the true companionship which such solitude alone can bring."
I never see the parade of a fashionable wedding that I am not reminded of her and of a sad contrast to her experience, when two young people were married amid a blaze of light, a rain of flowers, and under the curious eyes of hundreds of strangers took their wedding tour, while the papers glowingly described the dress and beauty of the bride, the necktie and the trousers of the groom, and pictures of the two were labeled "The Happy Couple." In two years the bride came home to her parents wrecked in health and broken in heart.
There is a beauty in a golden wedding that truly celebrates a happy union of half a century. But when life is all untried, when perhaps the two young people know nothing of what is before them, it may be are but little acquainted with each other, and have mistaken the thrill of passion for the steady exaltation of love, then it would seem wiser to make the occasion one of most solemn import, free from glitter and show, and full of that deep meaning which makes the heart stand still in reverence for life's deepest mysteries.
O, gallant young groom, it may seem a slight thing
To take this young girl as your bride;
To place on her finger the plain golden ring,
Around her these bright flower-festoons to fling,
But have you e'er thought what the future will bring
To you in this life so untried?
Have you thought how your temper may often be tried?
That you may grow gouty and old,
That the fair smiling face of your bonnie young bride
May grow pale and haggard, and wrinkled, beside,
Or she prove a sloven and scold?
And you, bonnie bride, on this glad wedding day,
In the midst of the curious crowd,
Do you fancy that life will be always so gay?
Can you work, can you wait, do you know how to pray,
Can you suffer, and not cry aloud?
Can you watch out the hours by sad beds of pain?
Can you bear and forbear and forgive?
Can you cheerfully hope e'en when hoping is vain,
And when hope is dead, and to die you would fain,
Can you still feel it right you should live?
O, touchingly solemn and tender the hour,
So full of deep meaning the vow
You have uttered. And sorely you need Divine power
To guide you and guard you in sunshine and shower,
For trouble will come and love's delicate flower
Be crushed, you can scarcely tell how.
And yet, dear heart, there is nothing that has such unconquerable vitality as love; but it must be true love, not self-love, not sentimentality, not passion, not any of the spurious emotions that masquerade under the name of love, and which wither with the slightest adverse wind.
Love is not an exotic, growing only in the conservatories of wealth. It is a hardy plant, covering desolate places with verdure, glowing amid the snows of mountain peaks, blossoming by night as well as by day, hiding defects, clinging to ruins, enduring drouth and heat and cold.