You cannot give the child a sweeter sleep by watching over him so intently: and yet you choose to stay. Moments are not so precious to you that at this one household shrine they will become valueless in some most chastened heart-worship! Your infant does not when awake understand the language which your affection addresses: and yet you look with rapture to the future, when the now inquiring eye will become one of understanding; when the cautiously put forth arms will clasp in loving confidence; when the fond endearing name now half intelligibly and doubtingly lisped forth will be uttered in the boldness of love.
The shadowy form in the distant cloud over the lake has been listening intently. It listens still; and the face of it bends towards me as if to say, there's a hidden truth and mysterious sympathy in all you say; and yet the language soundeth strangely in these bachelor ears—
Bachelor ears!
Listless and deaf, as yet, to all the sweeter human music of our nature. Deafer yet to the clarion call of emulation in the race of life and struggles for power, rank, and fame. Deafest of all to that which spurreth on man to be a king of kings among the great men of his race.
You are a father, then, I say; and working in your mental toil by night and day, in the severest and darkest frowning of all professions. But in the crowded senate-room, and in the close committee-chamber; and in the court-room among the multitudes of faces all about, (some of these anticipating in their changing features defeat and disgrace,) there is a something which overrides all agitation: clears the heavy brain, and oils the tongue with every pungency of rhetoric.
What is that "something?"
Were I home and in my library the downturned leaf of the duodecimo biography in the left corner of the first shelf would tell it you at a glance. The biography of Lord Erskine; marked at the page which speaks of his dauntless legal debut in the Sandwich case, when not the necessity of speaking in a crowded court-room from the obscure back benches: when not the sarcastic eyes of a hundred (etiquette-ly termed) brethren; when not the awful presence of Lord Mansfield nor his rebuking interruption at a critical sentence frightened the self-possession of the enthusiastic advocate, or stopped the current of his eloquent invective. The biography, which goes on to tell how, when the speech was ended, all the attorneys in the room flocked around the debutant with retainers—needed, more than all the smiles and congratulations to be drawn from earnest heart-wells: and how the advocate replied—(when some one, timid of the judge, asked how the barrister had the courage to stand the rebuking interruption, and never to quail with embarrassment before it)—I felt my little children tugging at my gown and crying, now is the time, father, to get us bread.
How eloquent!
How worthy of a father's heart! And in the reference, the dullest mind cannot fail to read the "something" which, to every father in a like position, nerves the will, disarms all agitation, clears the heavy brain, and oils the tongue with every pungency of rhetoric.
—The shadowy form turns closer towards me as my reverie yet chains me to the lake side, where the mountain breezes still are freshening all the August air.—