, and when she has practiced until she can play
"Bonaparte crossing the Alps," and you can't tell after she has played
it whether Bonaparte ever got across or not. Men are oaks, women are
vines, children are flowers, and if there is any Heaven in this world,
it is in the family. It is where the wife loves the husband, and the
husband loves the wife, and where the dimpled arms of children are
about the necks of both. That is Heaven, if there is any--and I do not
want any better Heaven in another world than that, and if in another
world I can not live with the ones I loved here, then I would rather
not be there. I would rather resign.

Well, my friends, I have some excuses to make for the race to which I
belong. In the first place, this world is not very well adapted to
raising good men and good women. It is three times better adapted to
the cultivation of fish than of people. There is one little narrow
belt running zigzag around the world, in which men and women of genius
can be raised, and that is all. It is with man as it is with
vegetation. In the valley you find the oak and elm tossing their
branches defiantly to the storm, and as you advance up the mountain
side the hemlock, the pine, the birch, the spruce, the fir, and finally
you come to little dwarfed trees, that look like other trees seen
through a telescope reversed--every limb twisted as through
pain--getting a scanty subsistence from the miserly crevices of the
rocks. You go on and on, until at last the highest crag is freckled
with a kind of moss, and vegetation ends. You might as well try to
raise oaks and elms where the mosses grow, as to raise great men and
women where their surroundings are unfavorable. You must have the
proper climate and soil. There never has been a man or woman of genius
from the southern hemisphere, because the Lord didn't allow the right
climate to fall upon the land. It falls upon the water. There never
was much civilization except where there has been snow, and ordinarily
decent Winter. You can't have civilization without it. Where man
needs no bedclothes but clouds, revolution is the normal condition of
such a people. It is the Winter that gives us the home; it is the
Winter that gives us the fireside and the family relation and all the
beautiful flowers of love that adorn that relation. Civilization,
liberty, justice, charity and intellectual advancement are all flowers
that bloom in the drifted snow. You can't