In the years before their marriage, American literary giant Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864) and Sophia Peabody (1809–1871) both kept journals. Once wedded in July 1842, they decided to share a journal, writing entries that both were free to read. Hawthorne’s first entry? “A rainy day—a rainy day, and I do verily believe there is no sunshine in this world, except what beams from my wife’s eyes.” Soon afterward, he wrote:
“It is usually supposed that the cares of life come with matrimony; but I seem to have cast off all care, and live on with as much easy trust in Providence as Adam could possibly have felt before he had learned that there was a world beyond his Paradise.”
