Page:History of Journalism in the United States.djvu/291

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JAMES GORDON BENNETT AND THE HERALD
265
"TO THE READERS OF THE HERALD—DECLARATION OF LOVE—CAUGHT AT LAST—GOING TO BE MARRIED—NEW MOVEMENT IN CIVILIZATION.

"I am going to be married in a few days. The weather is so beautiful; times are getting so good; the prospects of political and moral reforms so auspicious, that I cannot resist the divine instinct of honest nature any longer; so I am going to be married to one of the most splendid women in intellect, in heart, in soul, in property, in person, in manner, that I have yet seen in the course of my interesting pilgrimage through human life.

"... I cannot stop in my career. I must fulfill that awful destiny which the Almighty Father has written against my name, in the broad letters of life, against the wall of heaven. I must give the world a pattern of happy wedded life, with all the charities that spring from a nuptial love. In a few days I shall be married according to the holy rites of the most holy Christian church, to one of the most remarkable, accomplished, and beautiful young women of the age. She possesses a fortune. I sought and found a fortune—a large fortune. She has no Stonington shares or Manhattan stock, but in purity and uprightness she is worth half a million of pure coin. Can any swindling bank show as much? In good sense and elegance another half a million; in soul, mind, and beauty, millions on millions, equal to the whole specie of all the rotten banks in the world. Happily the patronage of the public to the Herald is nearly twenty-five thousand dollars per annum, almost equal to a President's salary. But property in the world's goods was never