How poor seem now your transports, as you met their
childish embraces, and mingled in their childish employ; how utterly
weak the actual, when compared with that glow of affection which memory
lends to the scene!
Yet all this is gone; and the anxieties are gone, which knit your heart
so strongly to those children, and to her--the mother,--anxieties which
distressed you,--which you would eagerly have shunned, yet whose memory
you would not now bargain away for a king's ransom! What were the
sunlight worth, if clouds did not sometimes hide its brightness; what
were the spring, or the summer, if the lessons of the chilling winter
did not teach us the story of their warmth?
The days are gone too, in which you may have lingered under the sweet
suns of Italy,--with the cherished one beside you, and the eager
children, learning new prattle in the soft language of those Eastern
lands. The evenings are gone, in which you loitered under the trees with
those dear ones under the light of a harvest-moon, and talked of your
blooming hopes, and of the stirring plans of your manhood. There are no
more ambitious hopes, no more sturdy plans! Life's work has rounded into
the evening that shortens labor.
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