O, Spirit of Conservatism! I have seen thee in the first green buds of thy spring time and thy youth, when thou wast a necessary and wholesome plant, in commonwealths as in families;—I have beheld thee again bursting into bloom, when thou wast still a beautiful and fragrant flower, smiling serenely and lovingly in thy green shady nooks, a blessing and a protecting angel, when the weeds of fanaticism and anarchy would spread a poisonous blight over the fairest and most venerable things of life;—but again, and too often, have I seen thee, when thy blossoms have shriveled up and fallen to the earth, and thy stalk was flowerless and leafless, and covered with nothing but dry seed-dust, with bugs and with cobwebs—keeping thy place in the garden merely because thou wast once beautiful, but now an unsightly cumberer of the ground, a brother to the meanest weeds and stubble of the field!
But such high-flown conceits as this I have just uttered, never entered the brains of my Uncle and Aunt Fabbins, and least of all would they see that it had any thing whatever to do with their house and its arrangements. But, good reader, if thou wilt look into it, thou mayest find a deeper significance in this family picture than at first meets the eye. The most homely and common things often cover a moral which is grounded in the very heart of universal and primal truth. If thou readest not merely to laugh, but to think, this little sketch may guide thee into the light of spiritual facts of infinite value; may teach thee the great lesson which in our age all must learn—to separate the spirit from the letter, the substance from the form—and to see that the best principle, carried to extremes and pursued with exclusive rigor, will, in its latter end, so differ from its beginning, that men will say, “I know it not; this is not the friend of my youth.” And if a straw like this I throw into the stream, may show thee how the current sets, I shall have done something more beside the attempt to amuse thee.
A PRAYER.
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BY J. B.
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Thou source of wisdom and of power,
Thou God supreme, who from thy throne,
On mankind dost thy blessings shower,