Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 1.djvu/183

1857.] By the fireside tragedies are acted

In whose scenes appear two actors only,

Wife and husband,

And above them God, the sole spectator.

By the fireside there are peace and comfort,

Wives and children, with fair, thoughtful faces,

Waiting, watching

For a well-known footstep in the passage.

Each man's chimney is his Golden Mile-Stone,—

Is the central point from which he measures

Every distance

Through the gateways of the world around him.

In his farthest wanderings still he sees it;

Hears the talking flame, the answering night-wind,

As he heard them

When he sat with those who were, but are not.

Happy he whom neither wealth nor fashion,

Nor the march of the encroaching city,

Drives an exile

From the hearth of his ancestral homestead!

We may build more splendid habitations,

Fill our rooms with paintings and with sculptures,

But we cannot

Buy with gold the old associations.

believe some people save their bright thoughts, as being too precious for conversation. What do you think an admiring friend said the other day to one that was talking good things,—good enough to print? "Why," said he, "you are wasting merchantable literature, a cash article, at the rate, as nearly as I can tell, of fifty dollars an hour." The talker took him to the window and asked him to look out and tell what he saw.

"Nothing but a very dusty street," he said, "and a man driving a sprinkling-machine through it."

"Why don't you tell the man he is wasting that water? What would be the state of the highways of life, if we did not drive our thought-sprinklers through them with the valves open, sometimes?

"Besides, there is another thing about this talking, which you forget. It shapes our thoughts for us;—the waves of conversation roll them as the surf rolls the pebbles on the shore. Let me modify the image a little. I rough out my