Page:Pleasant Memories of Pleasant Lands.djvu/413

 388 LOVE OF COUNTRY AND OF HOME.

bered cottage seems to stretch towards us a greeting hand, all the pleasures we have tasted, all the knowl edge we have acquired during our wanderings, we long to pour out at the feet of our own blessed land. Every usage of order and beauty, which distinguish other regions, we desire to transplant to her forests, or to see blossoming around her firesides. We feel willing to have borne an exile s pain, if we may bring back, as a proof of our loyalty, one germ of improvement for her children, one leaf of olive for the garland that encircles her brow.

Travelling unfolds to us the love of home, and the length and breadth of the domestic charities. While a sojourner in the tents of strangers, perhaps while gazing on the glowing canvas of some ancient master, the clus tered columns of some gorgeous temple, how often has the green vine, that waved over our own door, inter posed itself, or the chirping of the callow nest among its branches overpowered for a time the fullest burst of foreign minstrelsy. As these modes of feeling gain ascendency, we pursue our researches more for the benefit of others than our own ; and selfishness yields to the exercise of the disinterested affections. We sus tain fatigue with the spirit of a martyr, we adventure ourselves upon the mouldering tower, we thread the mazes of the labyrinth, we explore the mine, we ascend the cloud-crested mountain, not so much for personal enjoyment, as that we may be enabled to enliven our own fireside, to gratify the friend, or to hold spell-bound the wondering and delighted child.

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