In other ways, it is true he was
one of the most unfit for such a trial. And it was his beautiful
destiny to remain to the last hour the same absolute and romantic
lover, who had shown to his new bride the flag-draped vessels in
the Mersey. No fate is altogether easy; but trials are our
touchstone, trials overcome our reward; and it was given to
Fleeming to conquer. It was given to him to live for another, not
as a task, but till the end as an enchanting pleasure. 'People may
write novels,' he wrote in 1869, 'and other people may write poems,
but not a man or woman among them can write to say how happy a man
may be, who is desperately in love with his wife after ten years of
marriage.' And again in 1885, after more than twenty-six years of
marriage, and within but five weeks of his death: 'Your first
letter from Bournemouth,' he wrote, 'gives me heavenly pleasure -
for which I thank Heaven and you too - who are my heaven on earth.'
The mind hesitates whether to say that such a man has been more
good or more fortunate.
Any woman (it is the defect of her sex) comes sooner to the stable
mind of maturity than any man; and Jenkin was to the end of a most
deliberate growth.
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