ing. In proportion as you introduce splendor, you banish love. No child can grow up to love a house so adorned that he associates with it the perpetual warning to be careful of his hands and feet, all the freedom of whose motions must be checked by the cost of the carpet and the material of the sofa. If there must be a company-room, to be kept sacred from the intrusion of the child's foot, then let there be special pains that there be some room sacred to childhood, the wild domain of disorder and frolic, where things may be banged and broken according to the laws of an innocent misrule, without fear of rebuke. The furniture of home should be for use, and every adorning subsidiary to propriety and taste. The papers upon the wall, the casts, engravings, ornaments, should all have reference to home culture; not stiff or ugly or over many, but such as, living with the child, insensibly educate and elevate his taste, as living with virtue insensibly educates and elevates his character. A house that chills a stranger with the idea that its furnishings are to be seen and not used, which reveals no trace of childhood, or only of childhood prematurely prim, - rooms stiff and bristling and suggestive of the upholsterer, — is no home. How gladly one escapes from all this drear array of show to some cosey, free-and-easy, comfortable room, whose furniture bears the marks of use, where there

are no angles and straight lines, but the unstudied order, or the equally unstudied disorder, of a free and happy household.

The idea of a home cannot be independent of the house. I do not deny that there are homes where there is no advantage of the house; still, to the perfect idea of the perfect home the house is essential;

not a house of cost, but a house appropriate to the condition of the occupant, a permanent, useful, secluded abode, -a place not for the guest, but for the family, not for the adult merely, but for the child. The idea every man should have in building ought to be to build a home, whether the house be for his own occupancy or to let. It is time there was a little more humanity in landlords, and that public opinion rebuked this coining of money at the expense of the finer sentiments of the heart and home. We have had a precious inheritance in the old homes of New England. Our fathers builded better than they knew when they erected them, and he shall be the benefactor of his children who shall, under altered circumstances of time and place, transmit to his children a true home; and he shall stand highest among architects who shall strive, not to build the churches, the capitals, the monuments of the nation, but who shall give himself to the skilful planning of homes for the people, - a work Downing had so nobly begun when

he was suddenly taken away. The nations of antiquity, whose marvels of learning and of art still excite the admiration and wonder of the world, had no homes; there are no homes where the Bedouin slumbers in the shadow of the pyramids, or fodders his steed amid the crumbling magnificence of a longburied despotism; the gay and glittering Frenchman has no word for home; while the cities of the Continent, to whose monuments the rich, the restless, and the wise make pilgrimage, have no homes, the wretched hovel alternating with the palace and the ruin. They may do to admire as works of art, but let us have to show the traveller, to bless ourselves, to help our children, a land of homes, speaking to the eye of the stranger, and dear to the heart of the dweller.

H

II.

HOME, ITS INSTITUTION AND CONSTITUTION.

AVING SPOKEN of the house, I have some

thing now to say of the family in the house.

The idea of seclusion, isolation, is still fundamental. As the house should stand alone, so should the family be alone. It is a curious fact that the word home, in its derivation, signifies to enclose. A home is an enclosure, a secret, separate place, — a place shut in from, guarded against, the whole world outside. This idea is essential to it all the way through, and it is because of this seclusion, this shutting in, and the host of virtues which only so are possible, that there cannot be found in the whole range of language, ancient or modern, a word to convey the idea of our English word home. It is the centralizing of the joys, interests, affections of the heart, upon the place of abode, -partly the result of temperament, and partly the necessity of climate, it is the sacred seclusion in which the family dwells, which has gradually led to the establishment in the Anglo-Saxon race of a

home, a word in itself suggestive of a variety and a combination of virtues, possessions, and hopes beyond any other. Obliged by climate to seek comfort within doors, our English ancestors gradually accumulated the means of happiness about their abodes, until the home has become, as we have received it of them, the beneficent foster-mother of all that is best in the heart and in the man. It is from the fact that we are an in-doors people, that much of our peculiarity and our advantage comes. As another has said, "Make this whole nation an out-of-door people, teach them to find their amusement, their happiness, away from home, in gardens, in cafés, in the streets, as it is in France and Italy, and it would be as difficult to maintain our Republic as it has been to establish one in Paris and Rome. No one who has ever visited those cities, or Naples or Venice, or who has studied the habits and customs of their population, can fail to see the cause of their violent commotions, and uneasy, restless striving. The mass of the people are without homes and home influences. They live out of doors, in perpetual excitement, and the only idea of home to thousands of them is a place to sleep in."

Even the German, many of whose domestic habits and customs we should do well to imitate, hardly fashions his home after the better English model. He does not so much bring his joys and pleasures to his