genuity can devise; no bounty that earth can yield from her many-zoned
bosom; no shape which art can summon from the regions of the beautiful,
that is not possible there. Lifting its palatial walls, and kindling
with brilliant lights, it stands there as the completest symbol of
material refinement and civilization. It is arctic winter without. The
snow chokes up the dreary street, and the whistling wind cuts the
beggar's rags. But it is Italy, it is Ceylon, it is tropic gorgeousness
within. And these are the abodes of the children of fortune, whose
wishes require no talisman but expression, who, all their lives long,
have been used to such indulgence, or who accept it now as the fruit of
their own effort. This is the hospitality which some men find in life,
and out of which they constitute a home.

But none the less enviable, and perhaps much more so, are those retreats
where comfort waits on moderate means, while contentment imparts to
these an unpurchasable efficacy; where, blended with those infirmities
and liabilities which are common to palace and cottage, the domestic
affections flourish, and the dearest treasures of life are kept.
Thousands of homes like this there are, all around us. It describes the
largest class of homes, we may believe. And who can estimate their
influence over these busy tides of action, all day long? That world of
traffic, that world of toil, that looks so hard and gross and
sordid,--is it not transformed somewhat, does it not grow beautiful
even, when you think how many of its energies have their spring by the
infant's cradle and the mother's chair? And what lights, what shadows,
unseen by you, fall upon the speculative eyes, fall upon the hearts, of
thousands in that homeward-streaming crowd! Light of welcoming
hearth-fires, shadows of children's play upon the walls; light of
affections in which there are no decay and no deceit; shadows of sacred
retirement where God alone is; light of joys which this world's storms
cannot utterly quench; shadows of sorrow around sick-beds, and in vacant
places, that still make home the dearer as the arena of earth's purest
discipline and of its most triumphant faith!

And why delineate the features of that other class of homes, whose most
significant word is "_Privation_?" Where cheerlessness, and hunger, and
desponding toil, or hopeless apathy, brood continually. Let your own
sympathies, let your own imaginations that cannot exaggerate the
reality, cal