THE PICTURE LAND OF THE HEART
The day is blue above, without a cloud. Will you walk with me through our village, gentle reader? We will begin at the handsome open square. Now as we advance my heart leaps at the sight of my birthplace. What a pretty location it is! Here is "the cot of my father:" "In youth it sheltered me." It is the "loved spot which my infancy knew." "How dear to my heart" is this "scene of my childhood." Happy childhood thus early blessed with blessings hereditary to all after hours! There is no place so suggestive and interesting in our adult years as that in which we began life. It is one of those exquisite situations which paint their own picture insensibly in the memory while you look on them, natural, daguerreotypes, as it were. Considered only as a house, it left some things to be desired but it is never to be considered only as a house. Why is it that we thus love the place of our birth? Why have all men done the same? The son of the mist, in Scott, in his dying hour, begged that he might be turned so that his eyes could rest once more upon his native hills and close with their latest vision fixed there. Why did the hero of Virgil, in his death hour, manifest his love for the place of his birth which is so beautifully narrated by that immortal bard? It is an instinct, which gives to it a place in the human heart, and such an expression in human thought. Like poetry it is born with us, not made. There probably is no stronger feeling in us than that of attachment to our first home. A man transplanted to another field may have succeeded well. His condition may have been vastly improved and yet he may have drooped without apparent cause, in his temporary home, pining for those days which were passed in the Eden of his life. I could not get enough of the place. Must I leave thee, dear sacred spot, how can I leave thee? My heart was full and the tears started to my eyes as I gazed around upon every object. The words of my earliest progenitor, on leaving our ancestral garden, as quoted by Milton, came to me, "Must I leave thee, paradise?"
The Vine Must Have the Wall
Luther could appear in battle scenes for social and religious reform with undaunted spirit. He could oppose the enemies of his faith without a trembling nerve. He could resist those, bent on his destruction, with the courage and calmness of a Christian hero, but when upon a journey to meet the Counts of Mansfield, he came in sight of his own native Eisleben, the great man was overcome with emotion and he bowed his head and wept.
"The Man Returned who Left these Haunts a Boy"
Congress voted unanimously in 1824 to invite Lafayette to visit this country. He was received everywhere with great demonstrations of popular enthusiasm and his progress through the country resembled a continuous triumphal procession. He visited, in succession, each of the twenty-four states, and all the principal cities which vied to do him honor, but relatively he was unmoved. A splendid coach was at his service. He passed beneath an elaborate arch blazoned with words of welcome, but Lafayette relatively was unmoved. Sitting quietly with no expectation excited, before a screen in a public assembly, the curtain lifted and there stood his birthplace, in speaking beauty and suggestiveness and all the deeps of his heroic nature were broken up and he sobbed audibly like a child. The strong old home still held him to its heart.
How is such a birthplace marked? Chiefly by a gush of rich emotion in the heart of him who claims it as his own. Nature attends to that. A boy has warm affections. A birthplace may have no Forefathers' Rock. Peregrine White was not born there. No Charter Oak or Washington Elm, with living dignity may identify the place. There may be no cellar which concealed the royal judges, nor any door pierced by Indian bullets, nor drums which awaked the sleepers at Lexington and Concord, yet it is distinctively sacred to one's childhood days. It has the deep endearment of a darling home.
"I remember, I remember
The house where I was born
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn."
"Where is my home? I want to go before dark," said a spirited little fellow of three years. The action of his inner nature was like the turning of the needle to the pole. Thus an unfortunate child will put up a fight for his birthright and he will not yield without returning to the struggle. He wants his heritage.
