hich you are entering, as you wash your face
in canal water on deck, from a hand basin! It is a scene, I say
again, take it for all in all, that throws description upon the
parish, and makes you a pauper in words. '_Ohe jam satis!_'

Let the old bachelor, who 'longs but fears to marry,' perpend the annexed
invitation to matrimony:

'Some of my contemporaries have supposed that the estate of a
Benedict forbiddeth the resident therein to disport himself as
aforetime, in the flowery fields of fancy, and to ambulate at
random through the remembered groves of the academy, or the rich
gardens of imaginative delight. Verily this is not so. To the
right-minded man, all these enjoyments are increased; the ties
that bind him to earth are strengthened and multiplied: he
anticipates new affections and pleasures, which your cold
individual, careering _solus_ through a vale of tears, with no one
to share with him his gouts of optical salt water, wots not of. As
a beloved friend once said unto me: 'When a good man weds, as when
he dies, angels lead his spirit into a quiet land, full of
holiness and peace; full of all pleasant sights, and 'beautiful
exceedingly.' One's dreams may not all be realized, for _dreams_
never are; but the reality will differ from, and be a thousand
fold sweeter, than any dreams; those shadowy and impalpable though
gorgeous entities, that flit over the twilight of the soul, after
the sun of judgment has set. I never hear of a friend having
accomplished hymenization, without sending after him a world of
good wishes and honest prayers. Amid the ambition, the
selfishness, the heartless jostlinq with the world, which every
son of Adam is obliged more or less to encounter, it is no common
blessing to retire therefrom into the calm recesses of domestic
existence, and to feel around your temples the airs that are
wafted from fragrant wings of the Spirit of Peace, soft as the
breath which curled the crystal light

----'of Zion's fountains,
When love, and hope, and joy were hers,
And beautiful upon her mountains,
The feet of angel messengers.'

No common boon is it--we speak in the rich sentence of a German
writer--to enjoy 'a look into a pure loving eye; a word without
falseness, from a bride without guile; and close beside you in the
still watches of