Of late there have been going round the press pen portraits of Bulwer, Dickens, and Carlyle.  The two first are separated from their wives, and their lives are sunless and their homes are empty.  Carlyle, that dry and laconic talker and that fierce hater, is made beautiful when you read that he conducts his company to the pretty sitting-room of his wife.

Mrs. Carlyle is a lively, pleasant creature, and a world of thought beams from her dark eyes.  She has learned a great deal; her father gave her a most profound education, and she is possessed of a keen, yet mild judgment, of which her husband himself is afraid.  There she sits sewing with her handsome fingers a new cravat for her Diogenes.  In these surroundings all feel at ease, and Carlyle becomes talkative and witty, and displays his whole famous eloquence.  Happy the man who grows witty in the society of his wife, and finds there the atmosphere calculated to promote his highest, grandest, and fullest development.

Mutual confidence is essential to happiness.  The woman cannot confide in the man unless he can sympathize in her tenderness; nor can the man counsel with the woman, unless she can in some measure look upon the world as he looks upon it.

Hence it is wisely ordained that in every great man there are to be seen some of the feminine elements, and in every great, true woman, there are always to be found some elements of the sterner sex.

It is because the ballot has a tendency to make woman the rival rather than the companion of man, that it is opposed to the purest sentiments of woman.  She wishes no division, and cannot tolerate independence or separation from the object of her love.  Love cannot feed on strife.  The husband and wife are one, though God made them male and female.  If one acts in opposition to the other, domestic peace is slain on the altar of love.  What God hath joined, let not potentates or anything else put asunder.  It is an old truth, “Better a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox with hatred therewith.”  Man asks that his wife be pure, that she know but little of the deceptions and trials of trade, that she come not in contact with the rough exterior of life, that ever before the mind of man there might stand forth the beautiful ideal woman, whose influence irradiates the faith, with the light of love, in his journeyings through the wilderness.

“The family, and not the individual, is the true social integer.  This is implied in the inspired history of the creation of man.  God made of two ‘one flesh,’ or a unit of the human species.  Generals and legislators have not overlooked the fact that married men and women can be relied on in emergencies where single persons cannot be trusted.  Either part of a social integer is a pledge of the whole.  The vitality of society lives in its integers.  The future grows out of its integers.  They are, therefore, what ought to be represented in its political structures.  That it belongs more properly to the man than to the woman to represent the family, is manifest from revelation.  ’The head of the woman is the man, whom she is commanded to obey.’”

    ANONYMOUS.