Here's to matrimony, the high sea for which no compass has yet been invented!

Heine’s toast treats marriage as an ocean voyage: vast, changeable, and potentially perilous. Calling matrimony a “high sea” suggests both grandeur and risk—an undertaking that can’t be fully mapped in advance. The “no compass” image underscores the limits of rational planning in intimate life: love, temperament, chance, and social pressures can’t be navigated by fixed rules. As a toast, it also carries a wry, convivial irony—celebrating marriage while simultaneously warning that it demands improvisation, resilience, and humility. The line fits Heine’s characteristic blend of romantic feeling with skeptical wit, turning a social ritual into a miniature philosophical observation about uncertainty.