in the house, for sweet patience, and fine courtesy, and the practice of
all homely goodness.

Such a life, withdrawn as it is from common temptations, is not without
trials and difficulties peculiarly its own; but of these it is not
needful now to speak. It is more to my purpose to point out that it is
susceptible of a singular symmetry and completeness. The very narrowness
which has been imposed upon it by God, and which we are so ready to
regard as a privation, is only in another shape the restriction upon the
indefiniteness of duty which many dutiful souls so passionately desire.
For the claims upon an energetic nature are so many, so various, often
so conflicting; it is so hard to know which of two competing duties
ought to take precedence, so impossible to adjust effort at precisely
its right intensity, and to hit the mean between base self-saving and
foolish self-squandering,--that I think it must be a common wish for
keen consciences to have the boundaries of industry a little more
plainly marked out by God, and to be relieved from the perpetual
perplexity of choice. If only one had but a fixed and limited place to
fill! If only one could always clearly distinguish between what one
ought to do, and what it would be wrong and foolish to attempt! And
therefore, in this sense, God's prison may be the soul's liberty, and no
round of duty so cheerfully and completely trodden as one which we, who
are burthened with too large a capacity of flight, think sadly and
hopelessly circumscribed. Then, so God has willed it, Quietness and Pain
are sister angels, that have a singular privilege of access to Him; and
the soul to which they minister, through the weary hours of the day and
in the long watches of the night, may frequently mount upon their
friendly wings into the sanctuary of His Presence, bringing with it,
upon its return earthward, one knows not what glow caught from the
infinite and eternal Brightness. The difficulties of a busy life are apt
to throw mind and heart back upon themselves; the necessities of a quiet
life have in them this fine quality, that they directly lead mind and
heart to God. So ripen, slowly as the seasons pass and the years come
and go, that sweetness and roundness of character which we call
saintliness; and as we come in from our worldly work and struggle, with
its soil still clinging to us, and the joy of achievement always dashed
with the recollection of failure, we wonder at a goodness in w