ltivate their best
affections. Home is no longer the place perpetually to be driven from;
the voices of paternal duty and domestic love are thrillingly raised to
lead the tuneful chorus of society; and fathers, as well as mothers, are
beginning to desire that their children may be able to remember them
hereafter as the ever-sympathizing friend, the wisely indulgent teacher,
the guide of their religion, and the guardian of their love; quite as
much as the payer of their bills and the filler of their purses.

The misfortune of a past and passing generation has been, too much money
in too few hands; its faults, neglect of duty; its folly, to expect
therefrom the too-high meed of well-earned gratitude; and from this
triple root has grown up social selfishness, a general lack of Heart. No
parent ever yet, since the world was, did his duty properly, as God
intended him to do it, by the affections of the mind and the yearnings
of the heart, as well as by the welfare of the body with its means, and
lived to complain of an ungrateful child. He may think he did his duty;
oh yes, good easy man! and say so too, very, very bitterly; and the
world may echo his most partial verdict, crying shame on the unnatural
Goneril and Regan, bad daughters who despise the Lear in old age, or on
the dissolute and graceless youth, whose education cost so much, and
yields so very little. But money cannot compensate that maiden or that
youth for early and habitual injustice done to their budding minds,
their sensitive hearts, their craving souls, in higher, deeper, holier
things than even cash could buy. "Home affections"--this was the magic
phrase inscribed upon the talisman they stole from that graceless youth;
and the loss of home affections is scantily counterbalanced at the best
by a critical acquaintance with '_Dawes's Canons_,' and '_Bos on
Ellipses_,' in his ardent spring of life, and by a little more of the
paternal earnings which the legacy-office gives him in his manhood.

But let us not condemn generations past and passing, and wink at our
own-time sins; we have many motes yet in our eyes, not to call them very
beams. The infant school, the factory, the Union, and other wholesale
centralizations, ruin the affections of our poor. O, for the
spinning-wheel again within the homely cottage, and those difficult
spellings by the grand-dame's knee! There is wisdom and stability in a
land thick-set with such early local anchorages; but the other