A good daughter!—there are other ministries of love, more conspicuous than hers, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart’s warm requitals more joyfully respond. There is no such thing as a comparative estimate of a parent’s affection for one or another child. There is little which he needs to covet, to whom the treasure of a good child has been given.
But a son’s occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad; and he lives more among temptations, which hardly permit the affection that is following him, perhaps over half the globe, to be wholly unmingled with anxiety, till the time when he comes to relinquish the shelter of his father’s roof for one of his own; while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent’s house.
Her idea is indissolubly connected with that of his happy fireside. She is his morning sunlight and his evening star. The grace, and vivacity, and tenderness of her sex have their place in the mighty sway which she holds over his spirit. The lessons of recorded wisdom, which he reads with her eyes, come to his mind with a new charm, as they blend with the beloved melody of her voice.
He scarcely knows weariness which her song does not make him forget, or gloom which is proof against the young brightness of her smile. She is the pride and ornament of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness, and the constant agent in those nameless, numberless acts of kindness, which one chiefly cares to have rendered, because they are unpretending but all-expressive proofs of love.
And then what a cheerful sharer is she, and what an able lightener of a mother’s cares! What an ever-present delight and triumph to a mother’s affection! Oh, how little do those daughters know of the power which God has committed to them, and the happiness God would have them enjoy, who do not, every time that a parent’s eye rests on them, bring rapture to a parent’s heart!
A true love will, almost certainly, always greet their approaching steps. That they will hardly alienate. But their ambition should be, not to have it a love merely which feelings implanted by nature excite, but one made intense and overflowing by approbation of worthy conduct; and she is strangely blind to her own happiness, as well as undutiful to them to whom she owes the most, in whom the perpetual appeals of parental disinterestedness do not call forth the prompt and full echo of filial devotion.
THE SPIRIT OF THE AIR.
[Abridged.]
JOHN RUSKIN.
The orders of animals are the serpent and the bird: the serpent, in which the breath or spirit is less than in any other creature, and the earth-power greatest; the bird, in which the breath or spirit is more full than in any other creature, and the earth-power least.
We will take the bird first. It is little more than a drift of the air brought into form by plumes; the air is in all its quills, it breathes through its whole frame and flesh, and glows with air in its flying, like blown flame; it rests upon the air, subdues it, surpasses it, outraces it,—is the air, conscious of itself, conquering itself, ruling itself.
Also, into the throat of the bird is given the voice of the air. All that in the wind itself is weak, wild, useless in sweetness, is knit together in its song. As we may imagine the wild form of the cloud closed into the perfect form of the bird’s wings, so the wild voice of the cloud into its ordered and commanded voice; unwearied, rippling through the clear heaven in its gladness, interpreting all intense passion through the soft spring nights, bursting into acclaim and rapture of choir at daybreak, or lisping and twittering among the boughs and hedges through heat of day, like little winds that only make the cowslip bells shake, and ruffle the petals of the wild rose.