What school of learning, or of moral endeavor, depends more on its teacher, than the home upon the mother?  What influence of all the world’s professors and teachers tells so strongly on the habit of a man’s mind as those gentle droppings from a mother’s lips, which, day by day and hour by hour, grow into the enlarging stature of his soul, and live with it forever?  They can hardly be mothers who aim at a broader and noisier field; they have forgotten to be daughters; they must needs have lost the hope of being wives!

Be this how it may, the heart of a man with whom affection is not a name, and love a mere passion of the hour, yearns toward the quiet of a home as toward the goal of his earthly joy and hope.  And as you fasten there your thought, an indulgent yet dreamy fancy paints the loved image that is to adorn it and to make it sacred.

——­She is there to bid you God speed! and an adieu that hangs like music on your ear as you go out to the every-day labor of life.  At evening she is there to greet you, as you come back wearied with a day’s toil; and her look so full of gladness cheats you of your fatigue; and she steals her arm around you with a soul of welcome that beams like sunshine on her brow, and that fills your eye with tears of a twin gratitude—­to her and Heaven!

She is not unmindful of those old-fashioned virtues of cleanliness and of order which give an air of quiet, and which secure content.  Your wants are all anticipated:  the fire is burning brightly; the clean hearth flashes under the joyous blaze; the old elbow-chair is in its place.  Your very unworthiness of all this haunts you like an accusing spirit, and yet penetrates your heart with a new devotion toward the loved one who is thus watchful of your comfort.

She is gentle,—­keeping your love, as she has won it, by a thousand nameless and modest virtues which radiate from her whole life and action.  She steals upon your affections like a summer wind breathing softly over sleeping valleys.  She gains a mastery over your sterner nature by very contrast, and wins you unwittingly to her lightest wish.  And yet her wishes are guided by that delicate tact which avoids conflict with your manly pride; she subdues by seeming to yield.  By a single soft word of appeal she robs your vexation of its anger; and, with a slight touch of that fair hand, and one pleading look of that earnest eye, she disarms your sternest pride.

She is kind,—­shedding her kindness as heaven sheds dew.  Who indeed could doubt it?—­least of all you, who are living on her kindness day by day, as flowers live on light?  There is none of that officious parade which blunts the point of benevolence; but it tempers every action with a blessing.  If trouble has come upon you, she knows that her voice, beguiling you into cheerfulness, will lay your fears; and as she draws her chair beside you, she knows that the tender and confiding way with which she takes