A new hope and joy lightens home: there is a child there.
----What a joy to be a father! What new emotions crowd the eye with
tears, and make the hand tremble! What a benevolence radiates from you
toward the nurse,--toward the physician,--toward everybody! What a
holiness and sanctity of love grows upon your old devotion to that wife
of your bosom--the mother of your child!
The excess of joy seems almost to blur the stories of happiness which
attach to heaven. You are now joined, as you were never joined before,
to the great family of man. Your name and blood will live after you; nor
do you once think (what father can?) but that it will live honorably and
well.
With what a new air you walk the streets! With what a triumph you speak,
in your letter to Nelly, of "your family!" Who, that has not felt it,
knows what it is to be "a man of family!"
How weak now seem all the imaginations of your single life; what bare,
dry skeletons of the reality they furnished! You pity the poor fellows
who have no wives or children--from your soul; you count their smiles as
empty smiles, put on to cover the lack that is in them. There is a
freemasonry among fathers that they know nothing of.
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