Life and Literature Part 92

1274

I am almost frozen by the distance you are from me.

1275

Manners carry the world for the moment; character, for all time.

--_Alcott._

1276

Behavior is a mirror in which every one displays his image.

--_Goethe._

1277

MANNERS.

The distinguis.h.i.+ng trait of people accustomed to good society is a calm, imperturbable quiet, which pervades all their actions and habits, from the greatest to the least. They eat in quiet, move in quiet, live in quiet, and lose their wife, or even their money in quiet; while others cannot take up either a spoon, or an affront, without making such an amazing noise about it.

--_Bulwer-Lytton._

1278

Manners are the shadows of virtue.

--_Sydney Smith._

1279

Vulgar people can't be still.

--_O. W. Holmes._

1280

In society want of sense is not so unpardonable as want of manners.

--_Lavater._

1281

The wealthy and the n.o.ble when they expend large sums in decorating their houses with the rare and costly efforts of genius, with busts, and with cartoons from the pencil of a Raphael, are to be commended, if they do not stand still _here_, but go on to bestow some pains and cost, that the master himself be not inferior to the mansion, and that the owner be not the only thing that is _little_, amidst everything else that is _great_. The house may draw visitors, but it is the possessor alone that can detain them.

1282

Marriage is the bloom or blight of all men's happiness.

--_Byron._

1283

A MAIDEN'S TRUST IN MARRIAGE.

There is no one thing more lovely in this life, more full of the divine courage, than when a young maiden, from her past life, from her happy childhood, when she rambled over every field and moor around her home; when a mother antic.i.p.ated her wants and soothed her little cares, when her brothers and sisters grew from merry playmates, to loving, trustful friends; from Christmas gatherings and romps, the summer festivals in bower or garden; from the secure backgrounds of her childhood, and girlhood, and maidenhood, looks out into the dark and unilluminated future away from all that, and yet unterrified, undaunted, leans her fair cheek upon her lover's breast, and whispers--"Dear heart! I cannot see, but I believe. The past was beautiful, but the future I can trust--with thee!"

--_Hunt._

1284

_Advice on Marriage._--An Athenian who was hesitating whether to give his daughter in marriage to a man of worth with a small fortune, or to a rich man who had no other recommendation, went to consult Themistocles on the subject. "I would bestow my daughter," said Themistocles, "upon a man without money, rather than upon money without a man."

--_Arvine._

1285

Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards.

1286

ON A WEDDING DAY.

Cling closer, closer, life to life, Cling closer, heart to heart; The time will come, my own wed wife, When you and I must part!

Let nothing break our band but Death, For in the world above 'Tis the breaker Death that soldereth Our ring of wedded love.

--_G. Ma.s.sie._

1287

A SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENT.

A man of experience, declares that men, like plants, adapt themselves to conditions. To ill.u.s.trate his theory, he told of two men, one of whom said to the other, at a pleasantly critical period:

"Do you think two can live as cheaply as one?"