IN giving the following pages to the public, I am not following my own desire or thought, but yielding to the request, made many times, and by those of various taste, experience, and age. I am glad to do any little good I may, conscious that the little I can do for others never can equal, certainly never can cancel, the good I have received from others. The reader will find here simply the result of observation and experience - not the vaunting of my own attainment, but rather the covert confession of short-coming- the word of one who knows better than he does. If that word shall, in any way, help any toward the home life J believe to be possible, I shall be humbly glad.

CAMBRIDGE, 26th October, 1863.

HOME LIFE.

I

INTRODUCTORY.

SHOULD be quick to accuse myself of presump

tion in writing about so great and grave a theme as Home-a theme which has tasked the wisdom of many — did I offer in any way my home, or myself in it, as a model. Some things seem to have said themselves to me in life, and I feel that I should utter them. For it is more true and more vital than we are apt to make it, that which Emerson says, "We exchanged our experiences and all learned something." If we have deep experiences, why not have high talk about them, even though conduct come lagging lamentably behind? To stifle these because of the imperfectness of our attainment, is not merely injustice to ourselves, but a wrong to others.

Probably no four letters in the English language have so much significance, and call out such deep and varied feeling as the four letters which spell that little word Home! Probably no other thing has so much to do with making the man, and shaping his destiny

in both lives. It is the place he finds himself in when he comes into the world; it is the place he goes from when he is called out of it, and every intermediate stage, youth, manhood, age, receives from it the strongest influences and incentives. To watch lest that sacred centre receive detriment at his hand should be every man's prime duty, and his aim to leave it better than he finds it. Are there not some fundamental things which a true home must have, without which it is hardly more than a name? Is it not the want of these which is changing the character so rapidly of our home life, and threatening the vigor, possibly the life, of an institution which not only sanctioned but created of God, seems inwoven with the very fabric of life and hope, and can only be dishonored at a fearful cost to the manhood and integrity of the race? It is the high tone of our homes, the peculiar home life obtaining in them, which has made the supremacy of the New-Englander, and enabled him, child of a colder clime, and a sterile soil, to triumph over the merely adventitious advantage of other sections of the country, and become the master spirit of this continent will it be going too far to say the master spirit of the day?

A Home is not the accidental or natural coming together of human souls under the same roof in certain definite relationships it is not an outright gift of God, but a thing to be slowly builded upon fixed