WE commend the following truthful words to the attention of every wife and husband in the land. There was much more than a mere witticism in the remark of the old bachelor who had paid attentions to a maiden lady for twenty years, visiting her regularly every night, when rallied for not marrying: "If I were married I should have nobody to court, and no place to go at night." He had deeply felt the contrast between his own delicate and ethereal enjoyments, and the hard, discontented, fretted life of too many married people; and his answer was irony. He saw there was something in courtship which too often exhales and expires after marriage, leaving a cold, dull, monotonous burden where all was buoyancy before. Let us see what that something is. In courtship nothing is taken for granted. Both parties are put on their good behavior. Love keeps itself fresh and active by constant expression in word and act. But, strange to say, courtship usually ends with marriage. (Very soon after both parties yield to the sense of possession, and the feeling of security robs gallantry of motive and extracts the poetry from the mind. The beautiful attentions which were so pleasing before marriage are too often forgotten afterward.) The gifts cease or come only with the asking; the music dies out of the voice; everything is taken for granted, and the love that, like the silver jet of the fountain, leaped to heaven, denied its supply, ceases to flow altogether. Then come dull, heavy, hard days, with unhappiness, tied together and wishing themselves apart, and not always content with merely wishing. This is unnatural and wrong. What married life wants to give it new tone and sweetness is, more of the manner as well as the spirit of the romantic courting time. Very much of the pleasure of courtship comes from the constant attention of the parties to each other. Their affection voices itself in all possible ways. Every sentence is edged with a compliment and spoken in tender tones. Every look is confession. Every act in the new world is the exhaustless vocabulary of love. Kiss and caress are parenthetic clauses and gestures in the dialect of love, and gifts and sacrifices are the most emphatic expression of the spirit no language can fully articulate and no devotion declare. And it is the fact that affection confesses itself continually in look and act, making the voice musical and the fingers poetic in their touch, and doing that makes experience so beautiful—the only Eden many a woman ever has on earth. Love must have expression or it will die. It can be kept forever beautiful and blessed as at first, by giving it constant utterance in word and act. The more it is allowed to flow out in delicate attentions and noble service, the stronger, and more satisfying, and more blessed it will be. The house becomes home only when love drops its heavenly manna in it fresh every day, and the true marriage vow is made not once for all at the altar, but by loving words and helpful service, and delicate attention to the end.