Page:The Mothers of England.djvu/88

Rh sometimes with grave attention, or approves with cordial smiles; while he strokes the head of one, as another climbs his knee, and thus dispenses the familiar tokens of his affection, so that none can feel either slighted or forgotten!

But these are among the sunny spots of life, which it is not permitted that either tongue or pen should describe. As the glow of the winter's hearth, all bright and cheering as it is, has an influence more felt than seen; so there is a life-giving warmth to those who form the charmed circle, in these simple but yet touching scenes, of which nothing in after-life can destroy the vitality, and still less efface the remembrance. It is from such fountains as these, gushing forth in the secret of domestic life, that those streams of affection are supplied, from which we have to draw, in our intercourse with society, and with the world. There will be much in this intercourse calculated to divert the streams from their true course, to diminish or retard their healthy flow; but let us ask the Divine blessing, upon our efforts to keep the fountain fresh and pure, for without that they can give neither beauty nor fertility to the path of life.

I have sometimes thought that those simple sunny spots of human life I have here alluded to, were like the green knolls in a lovely landscape, left out by the painter as insignificant in comparison with the rocky heights, the falling torrents, and the precipitous ravines; yet chosen by the husbandman, and cultivated with peculiar care, because they alone are capable of yielding the harvest upon which his happiness depends. It is thus with what is great and wonderful in the picture of human life, upon which we sometimes gaze with an ill-directed ambition to tread its dizzy heights, or penetrate its mysterious depths, forgetful of the danger and the weariness inevitably attending such an adventurous career. Nor is it sometimes until experience has taught us, that the heights above are cold and barren, and the depths beset with perils profitless and dreary, that we come back, perhaps too late, when the autumn tints are upon the landscape, to seek