Page:The Clergyman's Wife.djvu/355

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Long Engagements.
353
"The gentle rayThey wore in courtship's smiling day"—

his voice must lose

"The tones that shedA tenderness round all they said"—

the roses of her bridal chaplet must wither and leave a martyr's crown of thorns upon the brow they encircled.

The probation of a long engagement is the surest talisman against this rude dissolving of the spell that surrounds lovers. During the interval their various phases of character are revealed by unforeseen chances—by life's inevitable mutations; and, being discovered at this blissful period when no life-shackle makes endurance compulsory, even grave faults and temper-trying peculiarities are readily tolerated and excused. Mental angularities are worn away and rounded off to a graceful smoothness, by the attrition of constant association. Their souls become attuned to the same key. The indispensable lesson of mutual forbearance is conned betimes. Love has leisure allowed him to build his temple upon the rock of perfect trust which no storm can shake. The flashing flame of enthusiam, by which its shrine was illumined at consecration, is gradually replaced by that steady, holy light, which fiercest gales cannot extinguish. Good spirits have whispered to the

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