I wonder if you have ever thought about the kind of courage—but also the kind of conceit—it takes for a young man to ask a father for the hand of his daughter. De Witt Talmage once considered this in a discourse on marriage and, frankly, his thoughts are hilarious. I trust you’ll enjoy reading about the very “sublimity of impudence” as he highlights it here.
I charge you realize your responsibility in having taken her from the custody and care and homestead in which she was once sheltered. What courage you must have had and what confidence in yourself to say to her, practically: “I will be to you more than your father and mother, and more than all the friends you ever had or ever can have. Give up everything and take me. I feel competent to see you through life in safety. You are an immortal being, but I am competent to defend you and make you happy. However bright and comfortable a home you have now, and though in one of the rooms is the armchair in which you were rocked, and in the garret is the cradle in which you were hushed and the trundle-bed
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