[Sidenote:  Appreciation and Accomplishment]

It is not surprising if a man who is passionately fond of music falls in love with a woman who has a magnificent voice, or a power which amounts to magic over the strings of her violin.  Appreciation is as essential to happiness as accomplishment, and when the two are balanced in marriage, comradeship is inevitable.  An artist may marry a woman who does not understand his pictures, but if she had not appreciated him in ways more vital to his happiness, there would have been no marriage.

It is pathetic to see what marriage sometimes is, compared with what it might be—­to see it degraded to the level of a business transaction when it was meant to be infinitely above the sordid touch of the dollar and the dime.  It is a perverted instinct which leads one to marry for money, for it will not buy happiness, though it may secure an imitation which pleases some people for a little while.

There is nothing so beautiful as a girl’s dream of her marriage, and nothing so sad as the same girl, if Time brings her disillusion instead of the true marriage which is “a mutual concord and agreement of souls, a harmony in which discord is not even imagined; the uniting of two mornings that hope to reach the night together.”

The world is full of pain and danger for those who face it alone, and home, that sanctuary where one may find strength and new courage, must be built upon a foundation of mutual helpfulness and trust.  No one can make a home alone.  It needs a man’s strong hands, a woman’s tender hands, and two true hearts.

[Sidenote:  The Light upon the Altar]

The light which shines upon the bridal altar is either the white flame of eternal devotion or the sacrificial fire which preys hungrily upon someone’s disappointment and someone’s broken heart.  But to the utter rout of the cynic, the dream which led the two souls thither sometimes becomes divinely true.

Marriage is said to be sufficient “career” for any woman, and it is equally true of men.  Like Emerson’s vision of friendship, it is fit “not only for serene days and pleasant rambles, but for all the passages of life and death.”

It is to make one the stronger because one does not have to go alone.  It is to make one’s joy the sweeter because it is shared.  It is to take the sting away from grief because it is divided, and the dear comfort of the other’s love lies forever around the sore and doubting heart.

[Sidenote:  Fire and Snow]

It is to be the light in the darkness, the belief in the distrust, the never-failing source of consolation.  It is to be the gentlest of forgiveness for all of one’s mistakes—­strength and tenderness, passion and purity, the fire and the snow.

It is to make one generous to all the world with one’s sympathy and compassion, because in the sanctuary there is no lack of love.  It is “the joining together of two souls for life, to strengthen each other in all peril, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.”