This thing they call matrimony
is in fact like diving for pearls: you bring up the oyster, but what it
contains does not appear until afterward. A friend of Sumner, who
imagined his wife had a beautiful nature because she was fond of wild-
flowers, discovered too late that she cared more for botany than for her
husband.
Chevalier Howe met with better fortune. He waited long and to good
purpose. It was fitting that such a man should marry a poetess; and he
found her, not in her rose-garden or some romantic sylvan retreat, but in
the city of New York. Miss Julia Ward was the daughter, as she once
styled herself, of the Bank of Commerce, but her mind was not bent on
money or a fashionable life. She was graceful, witty and charming in the
drawing-room; but there was also a serious vein in her nature which could
only be satisfied by earnest thought and study. She went from one book to
another through the whole range of critical scholarship, disdaining
everything that was not of the best quality. She soon knew so much that
the young men became afraid of her, but she cared less for their
admiration than for her favorite authors. Above all, the deep religious
vein in her nature, which never left her, served as a balance to her
romantic disposition.
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