C. Edwards Lester, Life and public services of Charles Sumner: Born Jan. 6, 1811. Died March 11, 1874.

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VI.

When life has gone on so long in this way, and the brave, manly soul has preserved enshrined this worship of woman in a mother's form, and it has filled the temple of home with so much of the charm of the sunniest matrimony,—without its fretting cares, and its vulgar and corroding passions—to marry then is a leap in the dark: —the more so, when, through disparity of age, the giddiness and absorption of early selfishness gaze rather harshly on the soberer serenity of the quiet afternoon of life, and set the sensitive nerves trembling. The hazard is still greater if it be a widow—and above all, a young one--that becomes the new wife. If just one million of such marriages were to pass before me in judgment, I should exempt that million of brides from all blame in the inevitable consequences that must follow this unnatural wedding of Winter and Spring; or better still, of Spring and Autumn, for they are still further asunder than the two other seasons. All this I believe to be literally true: but in saying it, I feel very much as boys do when they know they are skating over thin ice; and so the quicker the safer.