Rubens Peale, 1856

FROM “Home Whispers to Husbands and Wives” by Melva (American Female Guardian Society, 1859):

“OH dear! what did I ever marry for?” sighed a weary wife and mother. “It’s nothing but care, trouble, disappointment and vexation, sick and crying children, miserable, shiftless domestics, overtaxed energies, feeble health, and more than all, a cross, selfish, exacting husband. Oh! I wish I was dead and at rest in the grave.”

The wife lowered her complaining tones a little as she said this, for she knew it was wrong to cherish such thoughts, and when they took form and expression, they startled her with their harshness and sinfulness. But the clouds were dark overspreading all her sky that day, and the winds that blew over the plain of her life were chill and dreary, sweeping rudely and harshly over the chords of her soul. It was often so. Harmonies were the exceptions in her mournful chant of life-discords the rule. Hers was a vexed and sore-tried, a disappointed and overburdened life. It had for her no rest, no recreation nor sustaining sympathy, none of the sunshine of congenial love and confidence; and her soul had not yet learned to arise from the low grounds of its disquietudes and sorrows, and to enter into its “rest.”

An unusual share of physical burdens pressed upon this wife. Oft-repeated and protracted illness among her children, straightened temporal resources, jaded and depressed condition of her own physical and nervous energies, that made even small things burdensome, seemed to press upon her sensitive spirit with crushing power.

And in her husband, she had no solace nor strength. He knew very little about the needs, and concerned himself less for the comforts and pleasures of his household. He was far more zealous in doing something for the Hindoo or Chinaman, than he was in guarding and cherishing, in culturing and ministering to the joys, virtues and home-comforts of those whom God had given him to love and cherish, to guide and guard in all the ways of life.

He was a representative man of a class not difficult to find, who look upon domestic life as a theater for the exercise of man’s petty tyrannies, as an institution whose highest and almost only use, is to promote the convenience, comfort, honor, and aggrandizement of themselves — the “lords of creation.”

Some writer has observed that there are stairs to the inner chamber of every soul, though often obscured or out of sight. This man, this husband, had a soul, though it was a small one and much concealed and over-laid by the lumber and rubbish of material life. The doorway to it was hidden from superficial view by a heavy drapery of selfishness, and festooned by many a cobweb of moroseness and exaction. The “stairs,” leading thither, were very winding and of difficult ascent, and few troubled themselves to climb them.

Yet this complaining wife had once found the way to that heart as none had ever done before. She had entered its inner chamber, and with woman’s tact had wiped the dust from its windows, so that rays of sunshine had straggled in, warmed and gladdened it. It was a poor human soul —poor in the saddest sense of the word; for it was so narrow in its aims, so poverty-stricken in its sympathies, and so contracted in its growth towards its Maker and its fellow-man. It was a soul that needed a friend, such a one as that wife seemed to give promise of becoming in their early married life. But cares, disappointments and sickness, came to weary and discourage her. She felt the need of some human stay — her heart yearned for congenial sympathy, and without it grew weak, soured and fretted. Bitter thoughts had taken the place of loving efforts, recriminations had succeeded concessions, till we find her in a vast Sahara of the soul — a lonely traveler, though surrounded by living forms —wandering amid arid wastes and parching sands, pressing on wearily because there was no alternative, uncheered by love, harmony or hope. Life had become a burden to her. Its yoke galled and was grievous to be borne: yet, reader, it was more because of the way she wore that yoke, than of the yoke itself.

She was a professed child of God, but she lived in poverty and exile, far from her Father’s house; therefore when human sympathy and help failed her, she tottered and staggered with sad complainings on her weary way, cheerless, hopeless and forlorn.

“Life is rich and as full of blessing as it is of labor. Each hour is crowded with golden opportunities for laying up treasures of endless worth. The longest life is all too short in which to do its work, and win a crown and the rest beyond. Spurn not its precious offerings for discipline and soul-culture, but see in each an angel in disguise,” said a calm-faced matron to a younger friend, who, in the morning-time of her domestic life, overborne by the difficulties that beset her, was ready to faint and die.

Read more (pp. 215-219)

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