Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 3.djvu/112

Rh &a the blossoth falls when the fruit is set, and the leaves when it has grown. With this pure human affection, he loves his venerable wife better than before ; she him: they have been rising in love these sixty or seventy summers. Once, in their spring of life, their connubial love bloomed passion-red; then it grew to summer beauty; now it is autumn ripe, it is all affection; there is no romance; passion is gone. It is affection ripened by half a hundred years of use and wont; a gradual marriage sloping up to a complete wedlock of the man and woman. Now the two are one ; dualism is unified in a long life. This unity and its joy—that is God's benediction on a true marriage, fifty years a-making. All the wife's spiritual womanhood is his; all the spiritual manhood of the husband is hers. Neither has lost; both have won; each has gained the whole value of what was exchanged in this matrimonial barter. The old grandfather loves his grandchild better than once he loved his new-born boy or girl; with less instinctive fire of paternity, but with more general human love; for his character has grown more and more. Once his love was the fiery particle drawn from a voltaic pile of only five and twenty years; now it gathers power front the combination of eighty several summers and winters. He loves with all that added force. He no longer limits his love to his family; it has not the intensity of instinct, nor its narrow bound. His heart Went to school in his early passionate love. Marriage, paternity, brought new education to his affections. His babies taught him. Early his affection rode on the shoulders of his wife; then on the backs of his boy and girl; now it overtakes all men-friends, countrymen; yea, all whom God's love broods over in the world's wide nest. Once, when hot blood was in him,, he said, Aha among the trumpets, smelling the battle afar off, and he loved war; now he hates strife, loves peace. And so he honours the gentle deeds of charity, benevolence, and piety. General Jacksons, and Nelsons, and Napoleons, and Wellingtons, are not heroes of his: the good Samaritans are his beloved; not the great soldiers, with their innumerable trains of artillery and baggage-wagons, and their famous "great victories;" it is the good maiden, the angel of