Woodrow Wilson to Richard Heath Dabney

Title

Woodrow Wilson to Richard Heath Dabney

Creator

Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924

Identifier

WWP20435

Date

1888 May 31

Description

Woodrow Wilson congratulates his friend Richard Heath Dabney on his upcoming wedding and thoughts on marriage.

Language

English

Text

My dear Heath,

I am heartily glad to get the good news contained in your welcome letter of the 22nd. To be married on June 19th! Hurrah! and again hurrah! I speak from the card when I say that you are about to do the very best thing a man—and especially a student, as it seems to me—could possibly do. No one is so sensitive, as a rule, as the student—and there's no cure for sensitiveness like a wife's sympathy,—no strength like that to be gotten from her love and trust. Marriage has been the making of me both intellectually and morally, and, judging by my own experience, I look forward to hearing the same pæan from you before many months are gone. Of course a fellow's ecstatically happy at first, and all that is genuine and to be cherished—that first feeling of conjugal union; but afterwards, as years are added to months, that first ecstasy is succeeded by something even better,—a settled, permeating, sustaining, invigorating sense of strength and completeness and satisfaction which a man, if he be a man, would not exchange for all the wealth and success and fame that the world contains! You can imagine all this now: but wait and see if your imagination has done the subject justice. So soon as a fellow begins living for some one else he finds himself. In every sense “love is the fulfilling of the law.”

You will not charge me with growing sentimental, I know: I am not giving you my sentiments, but my convictions. My bachelor colleagues here think that bachelorhood is freedom,—freedom to buy books, to go to Europe in the summer, to indulge the hundred and one tastes and idiosyncracies which the student allows himself; and so it is—there's no doubt about it, a wife and family do 'tie a man down.' But when he loses in extension he more than makes up in intension. He gets an expansion of nature, too, a broadening and sweetening of his sympathies, and a rounding out of faculty such as come in no other way. He loses geographical and pecuniary freedom (if you will allow me the phrases) but gains moral and intellectual emancipation!

And now for what I sat down to say: make your wedding tour include Bryn Mawr, and convey to Miss Bentley our congratulations, keeping for yourself—the party chiefly to be felicitated—the heartiest good wishes and love of your sincere friends, Mrs and Mr.
Woodrow Wilson

Original Format

Letter

To

Dabney, Richard Heath, 1860-1947

Files

http://resources.presidentwilson.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/UVA00171888.pdf

Tags

Citation

Wilson, Woodrow, 1856-1924, “Woodrow Wilson to Richard Heath Dabney,” 1888 May 31, WWP20435, University of Virginia Woodrow Wilson Letters, Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum, Staunton, Virginia.