I have
never known him to stoop from it in the most trivial household
matter any more than in the larger or more public ones. If the
Hours make out to reach him in his high sphere their wings are very
strong. Happy, happiest is the wife who can bear such and so
sincere testimony to her husband after eight years' intimate union.
Such a person can never lose the prestige which commands and
fascinates. I cannot possibly conceive of my happiness, but in a
kind of blissful confusion live on. If I can only be so great, so
high, so noble, so sweet as he, in any phase of my being, I shall
be glad. I am not deluded nor mistaken, as the angels know now, and
as all my friends will know in open vision."

We will quote but this one passage from her letters about him, though
the Life is filled with similar ones, and will give but one of his
love-letters to her, and that not entire. He says:--

"Sometimes during my solitary life in our old Salem house it seemed
to me as if I had only life enough to know that I was not alive,
for I had no wife then to keep my heart warm. But at length you
were revealed to me in the shadow of a seclusion as deep as my own.
I drew nearer and nearer to you, and opened my heart to you, and
you came to me, and will remain forever, keeping my heart warm, and
renewing my life with your own. You only have taught me that I have
a heart; you only have thrown a light deep downward and upward into
my soul. You only have revealed me to myself, for without your aid
my best knowledge of myself would have been merely to know my own
shadow--to watch it flickering on the wall, and mistake its
fantasies for my own real actions. . . . If the whole world stood
between us we must have met; if we had been born in different ages
we could not have been sundered!"

What was poverty and obscurity and isolation unto these two souls, so
complete in each other that nothing else was desired? How deep a lesson
might the young of these later days, who hesitate to take each other
unless all things else may be added unto them, learn from this perfect
marriage! How much, too, could they learn from the dignity and the
refinement and the charm of that early home, where all was so simple, so
humble, and yet so rich and satisfying! Would that we had more such
homes of royal poverty in these days of vulgar pretence a