Nelly is not away; Nelly is a
wife; and the husband yonder, as you may have dreamed,--your old friend
Frank.
Her eye is joyous; her kindness to you is unabated; her care for you is
quicker and wiser. But yet the old unity of the household seems broken;
nor can all her winning attentions bring back the feeling which lived in
Spring under the garret-roof.
The isolation, the unity, the integrity of manhood make a strong prop
for the mind, but a weak one for the heart. Dignity can but poorly fill
up that chasm of the soul which the home affections once occupied.
Life's duties and honors press hard upon the bosom that once throbbed at
a mother's tones, and that bounded in a mother's smiles.
In such home, the strength you boast of seems a weakness; manhood leans
into childish memories, and melts--as Autumn frosts yield to a soft
south-wind coming from a Tropic spring. You feel in a desert, where you
once felt at home,--in a bounded landscape, that was once the world!
The tall sycamores have dwindled to paltry trees; the hills that were so
large, and lay at such grand distance to the eye of childhood, are now
near by, and have fallen away to mere rolling waves of upland.
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