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Love At Home
The thing which more than all others goes to make home a bright, and beautiful, and blessed place, is love. It is pleasant to fill the rooms with good furniture, to have tasteful ornaments and rare luxuries, to cover the walls with fine paintings, and fill the place with every thing that may attract. It is delightful to have fine gardens, and plenty of music, to have fountains throwing up silvery spray, and trees waving gracefully in the wind. It is better even than these to have fair young forms flitting in and out, and turning the rooms into fairy palaces. But all these, and many more, though they be crowded together in one place of abode, cannot make happy homes without love.
Love is the beautifier; love is the wonderful angel that can get music out of the common sounds of earth; love can make even a plain face comely; love can soften hard hearts, and change ill-tempers; love can brighten a cottage home, and make our common household duties most lofty occupations. Love is better than houses or lands, silver or gold, honor or fame. Those homes are poor, and cold, and desolate that have not love, though they be the habitations of princes. Those homes are rich, and bright, and happy, that have love, though they have little besides, and are only the small places where the poor man sleeps, and where even the children learn early what privations are.
People do not know how much they lose when they do not have love in their hearts. Nothing but love can make us willing to bear with one another, to receive in gentleness harsh words, to forgive and forget all injuries. Nothing but love can teach us the courtesies of life, can make us “in honor prefer one another,� can help us to be unselfish, to feel that the happiness of others is dearer than our own. Nothing but love can make our earthly homes anything like heaven and like Him. But we are to love, not only the others. There are plenty who can see that they ought to be kindly and lovingly treated, but who are careless of giving to others what they wish for themselves. Not “How much can I be loved?� but “How much can I love?� should be the question with all who are trying to live well the home-life.
From — Home Life. This book has no copyright date, but was given as a Christmas gift in 1873.
Posted by lilypress at May 6, 2005 2:37 AM
