loves are graceful
things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy
and proud to Home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor
man to his humble hearth are of the true metal, and bear the stamp of
heaven."
"If men knew what felicity dwells in the cottage of a godly man," writes
Jeremy Taylor, "how sound he sleeps, how quiet his rest, how composed
his mind, how free from care, how easy his position, how moist his
mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the noises, the
diseases, the throngs of passions, and the violence of unnatural
appetites that fill the house of the luxurious and the heart of the
ambitious."
It has happened within a hundred years that men of private station have
become Kings. One of the severest trials of their exalted lot has been
the disaster which came upon their homes.
KINGS HAVE NO HOMES.
I am told that the Presidents of the United States have complained very
naturally that they are denied that privacy which is accorded to the
lowliest citizen in the land. It should content the possessor of a Home
that he has that which Kings cannot have, and which if it be bright and
free from wrong, is more valuable than palaces and marble halls. Of this
golden right of asylum in the Home, Abraham Cowley has written:
"Democritus relates, as if he gloried in the good fortune of it, that
when he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him;
and Epicurus lived there very well, that is, lay hid many years in his
gardens, so famous since that time, with his friend Metrodorus; after
whose death, making, in one of his letters, a kind commemoration of the
happiness which they two had enjoyed together, he adds at last that he
thought it no disparagement to those great felicities of their life,
that, in the midst of that most talked of and talking country in the
world, they had lived so long, not only without fame, but almost without
being heard of; and yet, within a very few years afterward, there were
NO TWO NAMES OF MEN MORE KNOWN
or more generally celebrated. If we engage into a large acquaintance and
various familiarities, we set open our gates to the invaders of most of
our time; we expose our life to an ague of frigid impertinences which
would make a wise man tremble to think of."
What makes the remembrance of the old Home so happy? Was it not because
there the storms of life were turned away from us by those who bore the
blasts to
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