LETTER VII.

SOCIAL HOMES, AND BLESSINGS FOR DAILY USE.

How sweet, how passing sweet, is Solitude i

But grant me still a friend in my retreat

Whom I may whisper, Solitude is sweet!

COWPER

The good he scorned,

Stalked off reluctant, like an ill used ghost,

Not to return.

ROBERT BLAIR.

I

HAVE talked to you of your duties to each other, to

your relatives, and to your servants. It remains to me to speak of your duties to society, as heads of families and rulers of homes.

I have insisted on the thorough identification of husband and wife in feeling, pride of character and family, pursuit, and interest; yet I am aware that this identification may be perverted into a most senseless and selfish

devotion to one another, and an exclusiveness of communication, which are destructive of social life. I am acquainted with too many husbands and wives who, though all the world to each other, are nothing to the world. Their whole life is within their home. They gather comforts about them, they bear dainties to each other's lips; they live and move and have their whole being in each other's love; and, shutting out all the world, live only for themselves. I say I know too many such pairs as these. They are far too plenty. cannot bear to be torn from their homes for an afternoon. They take no interest in others. They never call friends and neighbors around their board, and they consider it a hardship to fulfil the common offices of social politeness-to say nothing of hospitality. It is not unjust to say that this is one of the most dangerous and most repulsive forms of married life. It is selfishness doubled, associated, instituted; and it deserves serious treatment.

They

Homes, like individuals, have their relations to each other; and, as no man liveth to himself alone, no home should live to itself alone. It is through the medium of homes that the social life-blood of America is kept in circulation through this medium almost exclusively. Every home should be as a city set upon a hill, that cannot be hid. Into it should flock friends and friend.

ships, bringing the life of the world, the stimulus and the modifying power of contact with various natures, the fresh flowers of feeling gathered from wide fields. Out of it should flow benign charities, pleasant amenities, and all those influences which are the natural offspring of a high and harmonious home life. Intercommunication of minds and homes is the condition of individual and social development, and failing of this no married pair can be what they should be to each other. Exclusive devotion to business by day, and exclusive devotion to selfish home enjoyments at night, will dry up, harden, and depreciate the richest natures in the course of a few years; and, so soon as the man withdraws from the business of the world, the world has seen the last of him and his family for life. They have no outside associations. It is as if they did not live at all. When they die, nobody misses them, for they have been nothing to society. As many doors. are open as before, and social life feels no ripple upon its surface when the sand is thrown upon their coffins.

There should glow in every house, throughout the land, the light of a pleasant welcome for friends. On every hearth should leap the flame that irradiates the forms and faces of associates. Neighborhood should collection of dark and

mean something more than a

selfishly-closed hearts and houses. A community should

be something better than an aggregation of individuala and homes governed by the same laws, and sustaining equal civil burdens. Neighborhood should be the name of a vital relationship. A community should be a community in fact-informed with a genial, social life, in which the influence of each nature, the power of each intellect, the wealth of every individual acquisition, the force of every well-directed will, and the inspiration of every high and pure character, should be felt by all. A neighborhood of homes like this, would be a neighborhood indeed; and none other deserves the name.

The fact is, that selfishness is the bane of all life. It cannot enter into life-individual, family, or socialwithout cursing it. Therefore, if any married pair find themselves inclined to confine themselves to one another's society, indisposed to go abroad and mingle with the life around them, disturbed and irritated by the collection of friends in their own dwelling, or in any way moved to regard their social duties as disagreeable, let them be alarıned at once. It is a bad symptom—an essentially morbid symptom. They should institute means at once for removing this feeling; and they can only remove it by persistently going into society, persistently gathering it into their own dwelling, and persistently endeavoring to learn to love, and feel an interest in, all with whom they meet. The process of regenera

tion will not be a tedious one, for the rewards of social life are immediate. The heart enlarges quickly with the practice of hospitality. The sympathies run and take root, from point to point, each root throwing up leaves and bearing flowers and fruit like strawberry vines, if they are only allowed to do so. It is only sympathies and strawberries that are cultivated in hills, which do otherwise. The human face is a thing which should be able to bring the heart into blossom with a moment's shining, and it will be such with you, if you will meet it properly.

The penalties of family isolation will not, unhappily, fall entirely upon yourselves. They will be visited with double force upon your children. Children, reared in a home with few or no associations, will grow up either boorish or sensitively timid. It is a cruel wrong to children to rear them without bringing them into continued contact with polite social life. The ordeal through which children thus reared are obliged to pass, in gaining the ease and assurance which will make them at home elsewhere than under the paternal roof, is one of the severest; while those who are constantly accustomed to a social life from their youth, are educated in all its forms and graces without knowing it.

Great multitudes of men and women, all over the country, are now living secluded from social contact,