Ae Fond Kiss. Sir Walter Scott's saying that "the four lines beginning' Had we never loved sae kindly,' contained the essence of a thousand love-poems," is almost as well known as the song itself, which is Burns at his sweetest. Fare-thee-weel, thou first and fairest! Ae farewell, alas! for ever! Deep in heart-wrung tears I'll pledge thee Ae fond kiss. -From "Famous Songs." The True Secret of a Perfect Marriage. It is Harriet Prescott Spofford, who writes beautifully about wedded life, summing up its possibilities for growth and discipline as well as its joys in the pithy passages which follow: This is Some pessimistic person has said that most marriages are unhappy. to say that most lives are unhappy. Yet on the whole life is a comfortable affair to the majority, and those who, looking back at the close, could pronounce their past quite unhappy would be an exceedingly small number. The greater proportion agree with the first criticism that was ever passed upon the world, that it is very good,-too good, in fact, for those who would better try to deserve it before they make a business of decrying it. But good as the world is with all its exterior blessings, its blue sky and golden sunshine and green earth, it would be an insufficient one but for the greater blessings afforded by domestic life. And the very root and stay of domestic life is marriage. That there can be sweet and fine domestic life where there are only unmarried members of a family to maintain it, or where friends combine about a mutual hearth. is true; but no one will compare such hearths to those round which a father and mother sit and see the fire shine upon the rosy faces of their children. And no one will pretend that any other companionship is quite equal to that of a marriage where either member is complementary to the other and the union perfect. Of course in speaking of marriage good, and sound marriage is meant, for no one has a right to judge of such a thing except at its best. We cannot judge of marriage by an average, because the statistics for such an average are unattainable; but we believe that there is such a thing as a perfect marriage possible, and so we have a right to use that as our standard. Nor is there any joy in existence comparable to the joy of loving,-a joy so keen as to be close upon the shadow of pain, as every mother knows who yearns above her sleeping child; and nothing but marriage, with its perpetual association of two hearts, with the multiplying occasions brought by children, affords this power of loving the fullest exercise. How much rounder and completer must be the soul that has been shaped by these experiences, how much wider must be the horizon of its thoughts and feelings, how much greater its capabilities! Surely, then, marriage is a school of life as great as and more beneficent than any other. Unruly scholars, truants, and dunces there may be in it; but to those who learn its lessons and apply its precepts the results of the teaching should be broader and deeper than anything under heaven. Not that it is without disciplines and rigors; indeed it would be of little service to one's growth if it were lined with roses. Yet the ordeal, says Mrs. Spofford, is not after all so severe, it is not setting one's unshod foot upon flints; it is once in a while giving up one's preferred way, it is sometimes preserving silence for the sake of peace, it is forgetting one's self till God and nature remember. And what are such duties and efforts in comparison with the recompense-the recompense of a purified and exalted being, the recompense of trust and praise and tenderness received, of trust and admiration and tenderness given-and how much more precious are these great delights for the alloy of the trivial hardships! Gold that is all gold, without alloy, will not pass current; it needs the little alloy, that it may not rub away and disappear in our hands; life without vexation would be weakening and worthless. When we see that house where a true marriage reigns, where the father is that bond of the house from which the Saxons coined his title of husband, where the mother moves like the soul of order and sweetness, where the children are fearless and fond, we see a home which is only a miniature cosmos, and whose light shines out like a star. Devotion to Home and Country. A. K. M'CLure. Take the sunny side of home. The home is the sunniest side of every great people. Without devotion to home there can be no devotion to country. The home is the cradle of patriotism; it is the fountain of happiness not only to individuals, but to nations as well, and it is the one spot of earth that should be guarded from needless shadows. Enough must come to each, even when most faithfully guarded by all the multiplied offices of love; but few there are who make their homes what they could or should be. |