Let the old bachelor, who 'longs but fears to marry,' perpend the annexed invitation to matrimony:
'Some of my contemporaries have supposed that the estate of a Benedict forbiddeth the resident therein to disport himself as aforetime, in the flowery fields of fancy, and to ambulate at random through the remembered groves of the academy, or the rich gardens of imaginative delight. Verily this is not so. To the right-minded man, all these enjoyments are increased; the ties that bind him to earth are strengthened and multiplied: he anticipates new affections and pleasures, which your cold individual, careering _solus_ through a vale of tears, with no one to share with him his gouts of optical salt water, wots not of. As a beloved friend once said unto me: 'When a good man weds, as when he dies, angels lead his spirit into a quiet land, full of holiness and peace; full of all pleasant sights, and 'beautiful exceedingly.' One's dreams may not all be realized, for _dreams_ never are; but the reality will differ from, and be a thousand fold sweeter, than any dreams; those shadowy and impalpable though gorgeous entities, that flit over the twilight of the soul, after the sun of judgment has set. I never hear of a friend having accomplished hymenization, without sending after him a world of good wishes and honest prayers. Amid the ambition, the selfishness, the heartless jostlinq with the world, which every son of Adam is obliged more or less to encounter, it is no common blessing to retire therefrom into the calm recesses of domestic existence, and to feel around your temples the airs that are wafted from fragrant wings of the Spirit of Peace, soft as the breath which curled the crystal light
----'of Zion's fountains, When love, and hope, and joy were hers, And beautiful upon her mountains, The feet of angel messengers.'
No common boon is it--we speak in the rich sentence of a German writer--to enjoy 'a look into a pure loving eye; a word without falseness, from a bride without guile; and close beside you in the still watches of the night, a soft-breathing breast, in which there is nothing but paradise, a sermon, and a midnight prayer!'
Here is a specimen of 'the show-man's trick,' which, as old MATTHEWS used to say, 'made a great laugh at the time:'