.

Let any one try to render the song, "Sweet Home," into French, and one
finds how Anglo-Saxon is the very genius of the word. The structure of
life, in all its relations, in countries where marriages are matter of
arrangement, and not of love, excludes the idea of home.

How does life run in such countries? The girl is recalled from her
convent or boarding-school, and told that her father has found a husband
for her. No objection on her part is contemplated or provided for; none
generally occurs, for the child is only too happy to obtain the fine
clothes and the liberty which she has been taught come only with
marriage. Be the man handsome or homely, interesting or stupid, still he
brings these.

How intolerable such a marriage! we say, with the close intimacies of
Anglo-Saxon life in our minds. They are not intolerable, because they
are provided for by arrangements which make it possible for each to go
his or her several way, seeing very little of the other. The son or
daughter, which in due time makes its appearance in this _menage_, is
sent out to nurse in infancy, sent to boarding-school in youth, and in
maturity portioned and married, to repeat the same process for another
generation. Meanwhile, father and mother keep a quiet establishment, and
pursue their several pleasures. Such is the system.

Houses built for this kind of life become mere sets of reception-rooms,
such as are the greater proportion of apartments to let in Paris, where
a hearty English or American family, with their children about them,
could scarcely find room to establish themselves. Individual character,
it is true, does something to modify this programme. There are charming
homes in France and Italy, where warm and noble natures, thrown
together, perhaps, by accident, or mated by wise paternal choice, infuse
warmth into the coldness of the system under which they live. There are
in all states of society some of such domesticity of nature that they
will create a home around themselves under any circumstances, however
barren. Besides, so kindly is human nature, that Love, uninvited before
marriage, often becomes a guest after, and with Love always comes a
home.

My next axiom is,--

_There can be no true home without liberty._

The very idea of home is of a retreat where we shall be free to act out
personal and individual tastes and peculiarities, as we cannot do before
the wide world. We are to have our meals at what hour we will, se