living thing, from the hugest animal down to the minutest
animalcule, whose pleasant associations are not circumscribed, or that
has not some favorite retreats. This universal preference, this love of
_home_, seems to be the element of being,--a constitutional attribute
given by the all-wise Creator to bind each separate tribe or community
within intelligent and well-defined limits: for, in its absence, order
would be banished from the world, collision between the countless
orders of creation would be perpetual, and violence would depopulate the
world with more than pestilential rapidity.

Shall it be said that beings endowed with high intellectual powers,
sustaining the most important relations, created for social enjoyments,
and made but a little lower than the angels--shall it be said that their
local attachments are less tenacious than those of trees, and birds, and
beasts, and insects? I know that the blacks are classed, by some, who
scarcely give any evidence of their own humanity but their shape, among
the brute creation: but are they _below_ the brutes? or are they more
insensible to rude assaults than forest-trees?

'Men,' says an erratic but powerful writer[AE]--'men are like trees:
they delight in a rude [and native] soil--they strike their roots
downward with a perpetual effort, and heave their proud branches upward
in perpetual strife. Are they to be removed?--you must tear up the very
earth with their roots, rock and ore and impurity, or they perish. They
cannot be translated with safety. Something of their home--a little of
their native soil, must cling to them forever, or they die.'

This love of home, of neighborhood, of country, is inherent in the human
breast. It accompanies the child from its earliest reminiscence up to
old age: it is written upon every tangible and permanent object within
the habitual cognizance of the eye--upon stone, and tree, and
rivulet--upon the green hill, and the verdant plain, and the opulent
valley--upon house, and garden, and steeple-spire--upon the soil,
whether it be rough or smooth, sandy or hard, barren or luxuriant.

'Like ivy, where it grows, 'tis seen
To wear an everlasting green.'

The man who does not cherish it is regarded as destitute of sensibility;
and to him is applied by common consent the burning rebuke of Sir Walter
Scott:

'Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native la