The Bellefontaine Republican. [volume] (Bellefontaine, Logan County, Ohio) 1855-1905, 1904-03-04
NUMBER 10
TO WIVES
WORDS OF TENDERNESS UTTERED
BY GREAT MEN.

The Homage That Tom Hood Paid to
the Partner of His sorrows and
Joys-Jean Paul Riehter's Unstfnt-
ed Praise of Caroline Mayer.
Few great men have paid more en-
thusiastic tributes TO their wives than
Tom Hood. and probably few wives
have better deserved such homage. says
the Chicago Chronicle. You will
think" he wrote to her in one of his
letters, ''that | am more foolish than
any boy lover, and plead guilty, for
never was a wooer SO young of heart
and so STEPPED in love as 1, but it is a
love sanctified and strengthened by
long years of experience. May God
ever bless my darling, the sweetest.
most helpful. angel who ever stopped
to bless a man. Has there ever, we
wonder, lived a wife to whom a more
delicate and beautiful tribute was paid
than those verses of which the burden
is, Il love thee, love thee; it's all that
can sayT'
Il want thee much" Nathaniel Haw-
thorne wrote 10 his wife many years
after his long patience had won for
him the flower that was lent from
heaven to show the possibilities Of the
human soul" Thou art the only per-
son in the world that ever was neces-
sary to me. and now l am only myself
when thou art within my reach. Thou
art an unspeakably beloved woman"
Sophia Hawthorne was little better
than a chronic invalid, and it may be
that this physical weakness woke all
the deep chivalry and tenderness of the
man. And he reaped a rich reward for
an almost unrivaled devotion in the
/ atmosphere of love and happiness and
inspiration" with which his delicate
wife always surrounded him.
The welded life of Wordsworth with
his cousin, .'the phantom of delight"
was poem more exquisitely beautiful
| than any his pen ever wrote Mrs
Wordsworth was never fair to look
upon, but she had that priceless and
rarer beauty of soul which made her
| life "a center of sweetness" to all
around her "All that she has been to
me-" the poet once said In his latter
days, 'none but God and myself can
ever know" and il would be difficult
| to find more touching and beautiful
picture in the gallery of great mems
lives than that of Wordsworth and his
wife, both bowed under the burden Of
many years and almost blind. walking
hand in hand together in the garden,
with all the blissful absorption and
tender confidence of youthful lovers.
1t never needed ''the welding touch
of a great sorrow" to make the lives
of Archbishop TAFT and his devoted
wife "a perfect whole.' Speaking OF
her many years after she had been
taken from him. he said. TO part from
her. If only for a day. was pain only
less intense than the pleasures with
which / returned to her, and when I
took her with me it was one of the
purest joys given to a man to watch
the meeting between her and our chill
dren''
When David Livingstone had passed
his thirtieth birthday. with barely
thought for such IAN indulgence as
wooing and wedding" he declared hui
morously that when he was a little
less busy he would send home an ad-
Ivertisement for a wife, preferably
decent sort of widow and yet so un-
consciously near was his fate that only
a year later he was introducing his
bride, Mary Moffat, TO the home he had
built, largely with his own hands, at
Mabotsa. From that "supremely hap
Ipy hour" TO the day when, eighteen
years later, he received her ''last faint
Iwhisperings" at Shupanga, no man ever
had a more self sacrificing, brave. de-
Ivoted wife than the missionarys
daughter. In fact, they were more like
two happy. light hearted children than
sedate married folk, and under the
) magic of their merriment the hard
ships and dangers of life in the heart
: of the dark continent were stripped OF
all their terrors.
ii Jean Paul Richter confessed that he
never even suspected the potentialities
/, iof human happiness until he met Caro-
line Mayer, that sweetest and most
gifted of women" when he was fast
approaching his fortieth year. and that
he had no monopoly of the resultant
happiness is proved by his wife's dec
laration that Richter. is the purest. the
holiest, the most godlike man that lives
. TO be the wife of such a man
is the greatest glory that can fall to 8
woman" while of his wife Richter
= once wrote, Il thought when 1 married
her that l had sounded the depths OF
human love. but l have since realized
how unfathomable is the heart in
(which a noble woman has her shrine"