...support them, and are depending on their making a good match for themselves and a home for yourself, don't trust to that. There are few happy marriages....pleasures, but teach them to live alone, if need be. Better so than to be somebody's sickly wife. Let them labor for love, and live trt(e lives. So shall woman's...

...self-reliance, and not to feel that they are to marry simply because everybody does marry. . . . There are very few happy marriages; there can be but few, where interest and selflove form the tie.'"5 Dickinson's poem stands out not for any new statement about marriage it might contain but for...