, sometimes
of fierce hatred, sometimes of sullen dislike; or that affection,
robbed of its moral supports, admiration, gratitude, faith, and
desire, will subside into a condition of spiritual tedium, unnoticing
routine; or else, the imaginative element dying out, while the sexual
element retains or perhaps even exaggerates its force, love will
degenerate into lust. These three results depict the real union
subsisting between three classes of husbands and wives, when the
hymeneal glow has passed, and fixed realities assert their sway. The
first is a hideous association of enemies, a yoked animosity; the
second, a lukewarm connection of colleagues, an external partnership;
the third, a convenient alliance of pleasure seekers, an animal
cohabitation.

But that imaginative stir which lends such ardor and elevation to the
honeymoon period is not always a fermentation of happy error. It is
many times a fruition of beauty and good, resting on a perception of
realities, growing greater, lovelier, more efficacious, with the
growing powers and opportunities for appreciation. In these cases,
where the divine bias which causes the newly wedded twain to put a
beautiful interpretation on all the signs of each other's being
depends not on illusion, but originates in truth, and where no fatal
alloy or shock interferes to destroy it, the blessed affection in
which they live together, instead of souring into aversion,
stagnating into indifference, or sinking to a baser level than it
began on, will naturally triumph over other changes, and grow more
comprehensive and noble, as enlarged experiences disclose vaster
grounds for justifying it, and furnish finer stimulants to feed it.
In such instances, the beautifying tinges of romance, that streak and
flush the horizon, neither fade into the grayness of fact, nor die
into the darkness of neglect, but now broaden and deepen into the
blue of meridian assurance, now clarify and ascend into the starlight
of faith and mystery. The conditions that originally inspired the
confiding and admiring sympathy become, with the lapse of time and
the progress of acquaintance, more pronounced and more adequate, and
insure a union ever fonder and more blunt. A husband and wife so
united generally remain a pair of lovers, but sometimes become a pair
of friends. Which of these two names is most descriptive of the union
depends on the relative space held in it by the element of sense and
sex. With some this i