Page:The Romance of Isabel, Lady Burton.djvu/203



I praise thee while my days go on; I love thee while my days go on; Through dark and death, through fire and frost, With emptied arms and treasure lost, I thank thee while my days go on.

N fiction (though perhaps not now as much as formerly) marriage is often treated as the end of all things in a woman's life, and the last chapter winds up with the "happy ever after," like the concluding scene of a melodrama. But in this romance of Isabel Burton, this drama of real life, marriage was but the beginning of the second and more important half of her life. It was the blossoming of love's flower, the expanding of her womanhood, the fulfilment of her destiny. For such a marriage as hers was a sacrament consecrated by love; it was a knitting together, a oneness, a union of body, soul, and spirit, of thought, feeling, and inclination, such as is not often given to mortals to enjoy. But then Burton was no ordinary man, nor was his wife an ordinary woman. She often said he was