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[118] more beautiful and bright — may your married life be as holy and harmless — may it be more complete, and more acceptable to God than your single life could possibly have been. Marriage, like death, is a debt we owe to nature, and though it costs us something to pay it, yet are we more content and better established in peace, when we have paid it. A young girl is a loose flower or flower seed, blown about by the wind, it may be cruelly battered, may be utterly blighted and lost to this world, but the matron is the same flower or seed planted, springing up and bearing fruit unto eternal life. What a comfort would Wevie now be to youshe is so much more loving than I, but thee knows I try. I have been better lately, the quiet nights seem to speak to me again, and to quicken my dead soul. What I feel is a premature old age, caused by the strong passions and conflicts of my early life. It is the languor and indifference of old age, without its wisdom, or its well-earned right to repose. Sweetie, was n't the bonnet letter hideous? I sent it that you might see how naughty I could be....


The Doctor's health had been affected by the hardships and exposures of his service in the Greek Revolution, and his arduous labors now gave him little time for rest or recuperation. He was subject to agonizing headaches, each of which was a brief but distressing illness. In the summer of 1846 he resolved to try the water cure, then considered by many a sovereign remedy for all human ailments, and he and our mother spent some delightful weeks at Brattleboro, Vermont.

Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. 1916.

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