azing hearth and social board;
Warm from his heart the tears of rapture flow,
And virtue triumphs o'er remembered woe!"

Sympathy is excited and measured by the power of natural affection. In
proportion to the strength of the latter will be the attractive power of
the former. That soothing voice which calms the wailing-infant; that fond
bosom from which the child draws its subsistence, and on which it pillows
its weary head; that smile which throws a sunshine around its existence,
and all those acts of kindness administered by the hand of love, draw the
child instinctively to the parent's heart, and blend in sweetest union its
very being with theirs.

The principle of home-sympathy reigns in some degree in every household
whose members have not sunk below the level of the brute. Its nature
demands that it be mutual. It should glow with peculiar warmth in the wife,
the mother, and the sister; because it is a more prominent instinct of
woman. It is an intuition of the mother's heart.

"When pain and anguish wring the brow,
A ministering angel thou!"

Who but she can smooth the pillow and soothe the anguish of the child of
affliction? There is a tenderness in her nature, a softness in her touch, a
lightness in her step, a soothing expression in her face, a tender beam in
her eye, which man can never have, and which eminently fits her for the
lead in home-sympathy. The want of it is a libel upon her sex. It is her
prerogative,--the magic power she wields in the formation and reformation
of character.

But her sympathy should find response in the bosom of her husband, the
father, the brother; for, if true, it must he mutual. Their joys and their
sorrows must be common. Thus heart must answer to heart, and face. "The
cruelty of that man," says J.A. James, "wants a name, and I know of none
sufficiently emphatic, who denies his sympathy to a suffering woman, whose
only sin is a broken constitution, and whose calamity is the result of her
marriage." Without such mutual sympathy, the members of the family would be
cold and repulsive, and society would be deprived of its most lovely
attributes; its members would lose the connecting link which brings them
together, and its entire fabric would fall to pieces and degenerate into
barbaric individualism.

"Had earth no sympathy, no tears would flow,
In heart-felt sorrow, for another's woe;
The joyous spirit then would weary roam,
A stranger to the dear delights