The Prose of Matrimony
But after a while the romance is all gone, and then there is something to be prepared for the table that the book called “Cookery Taught in Twelve Lessons” will not teach. The receipt for making it is not a handful of this, a cup of that and a spoonful of something else. It is not something sweetened with ordinary condiments, or flavored with ordinary flavors, or baked in ordinary ovens. It is the loaf of domestic happiness; and all the ingredients come down from heaven, and the fruits are plucked from the tree of life, and it is sweetened with the new wine of the kingdom, and it is baked in the oven of home trial. Solomon wrote out of his own experience. He had a wretched home. A man cannot be happy with two wives, much less six hundred; and he says, writing out of his own experience: “Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.”