The Golden Censer | Page 9

end to which every enterprise
and labor tends, and of which every desire prompts the prosecution." In
the mind of the good there gather about the old Home
HALO UPON HALO OF FOND THOUGHT,
of nearly idolatrous memory. Upon this very green, the joyous march
of youth went on. Here the glad days whirled round like wheels. At
morn the laugh was loud; at eve the laughter rang. To-day, perhaps the
most joyous of the flock lies in the earth. Perhaps the chief spirit of the
wildest gambols is bent with sharp affliction; the one that loved his
mother best is in a foreign land; the one that doubled her small cares
with dolls goes every week to gaze at little gravestones, and the one
that would not stay in bed upon the sun's bright rise now sits in awful
blindness. You cannot rob these hearts of their sweet memories. The
mystic keyword unlocks the gates. The peaceful waters flow; the thirsty

soul is satisfied.
THE LONG AGO.
A lady opens a short epistle from her brother. He is rich, successful,
busy, in short driven, cannot visit her at a certain date, regrets, with
love, etc., all in ten short lines. What does this dry notice tell? It tells of
a buffalo-robe which, by much strategy, can be secured from father's
study; it tells of a daring, rollicking boy who has got the strategy and
will soon get the buffalo-robe. It tells of two boys and three girls, all
gathered in the robe, with the rollicking one as fireman and engineer,
making the famous trip down the stairs which shall tumble them all into
the presence of a parent who will make a weak demonstration of
severity, clearly official, and merely masking a very evident inclination
to try a trip on the same train.
WHERE WAS THIS?
Why at the dear old Home, in the Long Ago. Who was the fireman and
engineer? Why, this great, pompous man of business, whose short note
his sister has just laid down--of course, he was the fireman and the
engineer!
We see the sister of Rembrandt, the painter, traveling weary miles to
the house of the brother whom in youth she shielded from the wrath of
a drunken father, whose rude pictures she concealed from eyes that
would have looked upon them in anger. Now he is the most celebrated
painter of his time. He is rich beyond the imagination of his humble
contemporaries. He never receives people into his stronghold.
TWO GREAT DOGS GUARD THE ENTRANCE.
Into a gloomy portal the aged sister enters, and soon the miser and the
good angel of his past are together. There they sit in the dusk, and
recall, after sixty years of separation, the scenes of the Home which
existed eighty years before! We marvel at a word that comes along a
cable under the ocean. Why should we not also wonder at a little word
that can sound across the awful stretch of eighty years, through

AN OCEAN OF LIFE,
stormy with fearful disappointments, boisterous with seasons of
success, and desolate with the drift, the slime, and the fungus of
miserly greed!
Says Dickens: "If ever household affections and loves are graceful
things, they are graceful in the poor. The ties that bind the wealthy and
proud to Home may be forged on earth, but those which link the poor
man to his humble hearth are of the true metal, and bear the stamp of
heaven."
"If men knew what felicity dwells in the cottage of a godly man,"
writes Jeremy Taylor, "how sound he sleeps, how quiet his rest, how
composed his mind, how free from care, how easy his position, how
moist his mouth, how joyful his heart, they would never admire the
noises, the diseases, the throngs of passions, and the violence of
unnatural appetites that fill the house of the luxurious and the heart of
the ambitious."
It has happened within a hundred years that men of private station have
become Kings. One of the severest trials of their exalted lot has been
the disaster which came upon their homes.
KINGS HAVE NO HOMES.
I am told that the Presidents of the United States have complained very
naturally that they are denied that privacy which is accorded to the
lowliest citizen in the land. It should content the possessor of a Home
that he has that which Kings cannot have, and which if it be bright and
free from wrong, is more valuable than palaces and marble halls. Of
this golden right of asylum in the Home, Abraham Cowley has written:
"Democritus relates, as if he gloried in the good fortune of it, that when
he came to Athens, nobody there did so much as take notice of him;
and Epicurus lived