Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: DOMESTIC LIFE. ‘ . “,’.‘ ’ ij - ,‘. ’ I
‘ ’ . O friendly to the best pursuits of mail, Friendly to thought, to virtue, anil to peace, Domestic life.? Cowper. It is but for a short part of life that the world is a wonder and delight to us, when its events are so many causes of joy and admiration. The mist of morning soon breaks into little wreaths, and is lost in the air; and the objects which it drest in new beauties, are found to be things of our common notice. It passes off from the earth, and the fairy sea is swallowed up, and the green islands, scattered far and wide over it, are again turned into tall trees and mountain brushwood. In early life we are for ever giving objects the hue that best pleases us,, and shaping and enlarging them as suits our imagination. But the time comes when we must look upon the unsightly without changing it, and when the hardness of reality makes us feel that there are things not to be moulded to our fancies. Men and their actions were figured to our minds in extremes. Giants and dwarfs peopled the world, and filled it with deeds of heroic virtue and desperate vice. , All that we looked forward to kept our spirits 1 alive, and our imagination found food for our desires. At one time, we were vainglorious at our victories over magnificent crimes; at another, bearing up firmly against oppression with the honest and tried. We come at length into the world, and find men too busy about their own affairs, to make those of another their concern, and too careful of themselves, to go a tilting for another’s rights. Even the bad have a mixture in their character which takes away its poetic effect, and we at last settle down in the dull conviction, that we are never to meet with entire and splendid virtue, or unmixed vice. Wi…
