his emotions will appear in a new orchestration, as it were.  In the gallant attentions of a loving husband, the anxious eagerness to please is displaced by a pleasant sense of duty and gentlemanly courtesy.  He still prefers his wife to all other women and wants a monopoly of her love; but this feeling has a proprietary tinge that was absent before.  Jealousy, too, assumes a new aspect; it may, temporarily, bring back the uncertainty of courtship, but the emotion is colored by entirely different ideas:  jealousy in a lover is a green-eyed monster gnawing merely at his hopes, and not, as in a husband, threatening to destroy his property and his family honor—­which makes a great difference in the quality of the feeling and its manifestation.  The wife, on her part, has no more use for coyness, but can indulge in the luxury of bestowing gallant attentions which before marriage would have seemed indelicate or forward, while after marriage they are a pleasant duty, rising in some cases to heroic self-sacrifice.

If even within the sphere of romantic love no two cases are exactly alike, how could love before marriage be the same as after marriage when so many new experiences, ideas, and associations come into play?  Above all, the feelings relating to the children bring an entirely new group of tones into the complex harmony of affection.  The intimacies of married life, the revelation of characteristics undiscovered before marriage, the deeper sympathy, the knowledge that theirs is “one glory an’ one shame”—­these and a hundred other domestic experiences make romantic love undergo a change into something that may be equally rich and strange but is certainly quite different.  A wife’s charms are different from a girl’s and inspire a different kind of love.  The husband loves

     Those virtues which, before untried,
     The wife has added to the bride,

as Samuel Bishop rhymes it.  In their predilection for maidens, poets, like novelists, have until recently ignored the wife too much.  But Cowper sang: 

     What is there in the vale of life
     Half so delightful as a wife,
     When friendship, love and peace combine
     To stamp the marriage bond divine? 
     The stream of pure and genuine love
     Derives its current from above;
     And earth a second Eden shows,
     Where’er the healing water flows.

Some of the specifically romantic ingredients of love, on the other hand—­adoration, hyperbole, the mixed moods of hope and despair—­do not normally enter into conjugal affection.  No one would fail to see the absurdity of a husband’s exclaiming

     O that I were a glove upon that hand
     That I might touch that cheek.

He may touch that cheek, and kiss it too—­and that makes a tremendous difference in the tone and tension of his feelings.  Unlike the lover, the husband does not think, feel, and speak in perpetual hyperboles.  He does not use expressions like “beautiful tyrant, fiend angelical,” or speak of