HAPPY MARRIAGES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 97, 26 April 1930, Page 13

HAPPY MARRIAGES.

SOME NOTABLE EXAMPLES.

ANSWERS TO MODERN CYNICS. Modern sex novels have made some of the younger generation so cynical that they say of carried happiness, does it exist 1 It will do them good to read the "Life of Lord Wolseley." The old field marshal and his wife are worthy to rank with the great lovers of history. You have Lady Wolseley writing in 1906: "Dearest dearest—How old and dry the youngish are compared to'sixtythree. Perhaps they will get young— but you •" at seventy-two arc a lighthearted Doy." Five years later, Lord Wolseley writing: "My Dearest of Dear Women, —I love you as of yore, and I feel sure that the last earthly thought tnat will pass through my brain while dying will be of you." Love and marriage in the case of many of the world's great men were indeed the lodestars of their existence. "She was my star, my angel. Without her I should never have been the

man I am." Such was one of the many tributes which Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, paid to his wife who, from the day he first met her in 1846 to the day of her death fifty-one years later, J-o loved with ah affection that never swerved for one moment. "A perfect marriage," sums up the happy wedded life of that other grea statesman, Disraeli. 'Tor thirty-three years she has never given me a dull moment," was the Disraelian lament ot the husband when Lady Beaconsfield lay flying. Nor could anything exceed the domestic felicity and lifelong happiness which characterised the career of Disraeli's great contemporary, Gladstone. Jean Paul Richter wrote of his wife. "Marriage, has made mc love her more romantically, deeper, infinitely more than before"; whilst his helpmeet observed: "Richter is the purest, the holiest. the most godlike man that lives." Heine was happy in his married life: and so also were Moore, Wordsworth and Tom Hood. When William Blake, the poet, was dying he said to his faithful companion:' • "I have no grief but in leaving you, Catherine; Ave hs?ve lived happy, and we have lived long."