Birthplace

“ High above his birthplace the snowy Alps paint themselves against the sky, an aerial dream of beauty, softened by the tender hues of dawn and sunset, serenely fair through the rift of the tempest; even their white death takes a nameless grace from distance and atmosphere, clothing itself in beauty as a spirit in clay, and tempting wanderers to their graves: but no such beauty clothes the man whose daily vision beholds them; hard, clamorous, disputatious, with one hand he rends the rotten splendors of Rome from its tottering Image, and with the other plunges baby-souls to inevitable damnation ”

“ It looks to the grandest genealogy in the universe, the ancestry of a whole race; not a few favored individuals, but all humanity. My brethren, fellow sharers of immortality, open this family record. Trace your ancestry back to the most august parentage in the universe: One is our Father, God; One our elder brother, Jesus. We all draw lineage from the King of kings and the Lord of lords. Herein consists the value and dignity of human life. I go back to the origin of the globe. I find that for five days the creative hand of the Almighty is busy in fitting up an abode of palatial splendor. ”

“ By what right or reason, by what logic of character, can you, a democrat, renouncing all advantages of birth,--neither priding yourself on family, nor seeking to found one,--how therefore can you care for genealogies, or for this fantastic science of heraldry? ”

“ In some instances, where their term of residence in a place has evidently been of limited duration, they have either lost or conceal their knowledge of the country whence their ancestors came, and assert that the Master of Life created and planted their fathers on the spot where they, their posterity, now live. ”

“ However fate may cast our lot, A land, a fatherland, we’ve got. Will there a thing on earth appear More worthy, to hold dear? 8.
And here’s, and here’s this fatherland, Here every eye it sees; And we can stretch a pointing hand, To show, with joy, its sea and strand, And say, “Behold this country, this, Our Fatherland it is.” ”

“ I had arrived in sight of my father's habitation, and paused on a slight eminence to contemplate with mingled feelings of surprise, delight, and fear, the spot made sacred by the affections which were centred there, with all the ties which bound me to the world—that spot which, from the meanest to the noblest in every land, is the only haven of refuge from the troubles and travail in this life, and which finds a ready response in every heart by the one magic word—home! ”

“ We see that our ancestors were no savages, but agricultural nomads, that they laboured, made roads, possessed the art of weaving and sewing; they built towns, kept domestic animals, lived under a kingly government, and counted at least up to one hundred. We learn this not only from the words father, mother, son, daughter, heaven, earth, but also from house, town, king, dog, cow, hatchet, and many others, which are found to be the same in the German, Celtic, Slavonic, Greek, Latin, and Sanscrit. ”

“ We have been thus particular in the description of this spot as it is the birth-place of two persons who will bear an important part in the tale we are about to relate, and partly, because we love this spot where we have whiled away many an hour of our boyish days. The peculiarities of one’s birth-place have much influence upon formation of the character and disposition. ”

“ Articles on the Sun-Ray origin of the Pyramids and Cuneiform Character
[Image] Edinburgh Castle, From the Vennel
AUTOBIOGRAPHY. CHAPTER 1. My Ancestry Our history begins before we are born. We represent the hereditary influences of our race, and our ancestors virtually live in us. The sentiment of ancestry seems to be inherent in human nature, especially in the more civilised races. At all events, we cannot help having a due regard for the history of our forefathers. Our curiosity is stimulated by their immediate or indirect influence upon ourselves. ”

“ Nearest and dearest to his heart, she rendered the memory of his native land still more beloved, for she yet trod its soil and breathed its air, and he knew that daily she could gaze on those blue hills which are the first landmarks of the child in youth, and the last of the man in age, and to the recollection of which the emigrant and the exile cling with the tenacity of life. ”

“ In a few years men will understand why, in this country, as well as in England, people are hunting up their genealogy, and by tradition, history, and heraldry, trying to ascertain of what family they are. ”

“ A man's family history or genealogy was the ruling factor in determining his home, his occupation, and his social position. In the chronicler's time this was especially the case with the official ministers of religion, the Temple establishment to which he himself belonged. The priests, the Levites, the singers, and doorkeepers formed castes in the strict sense of the word. A man's birth definitely assigned him to one of these classes, to which none but the members of certain families could belong. ”

“ I never in my whole life heard so much of birth and family as since I came to this town; where blood enjoys a thousand exclusive privileges, where Cavalier and Dama are words of the first, nay of the only importance; where wit and beauty are considered as useless without a long pedigree; and virtue, talents, wealth, and wisdom, are thought on only as medals to hang upon the branch of a genealogical tree, as we tie trinkets to a watch in England. ”

“ Her sons and daughters, knowing no better because of their peculiar environment, grew up believing this old earth most beautiful, and the nobility of their world seemed to create in them nobility of character. The sheltered peace of that green valley entered into their souls. ”

“ Strange as the venerable place may be it comes quite naturally into the story of our common ancestry. It seems, in some indefinite way, to be a family possession which we can regard with a personal interest and a legitimate curiosity. ”

“ Your heritage is in a goodly land. Its fields are wide; its skies are bright; and its people free. Choose you out its men of mark—the great and good—as patterns for yourselves. Ask of their experience, if in its silent teachings you may not find reason—nay more—encouragement, to hope for a good name too—a place among them. ”

“ Like so many other people, I came from a very old family, one from which there is good proof of an unbroken line through the Dark Ages, and all ages, to the first man. I have never given any time to tracing ancestry, but have a sort of quiet satisfaction that mine is certainly American as far as it well can be. ”

“ We think of a particular house or village where we were born and where we spent our impressionable days of childhood; these others regard home not as a geographical but as a social centre, liable to shift from place to place; they are at home everywhere, so long as their clan is about them. ”

“ In a wild part of North England, there lived once two wild men,
Inhabiting one homestead, neither a hovel nor hut,
Time out of mind their birthright: father and son, these,—but,—
Such a son, such a father! ”

“ I have learned that in England you like to know a great deal about people who are introduced to you—who their fathers and mothers are, their grandfathers and grandmothers, and even further back than that. ”

“ One father had they all, one of the patriarchs, a well-loved leader, wise of heart and dear unto his kinsmen, who held the landright and begat a line of valiant men, the tribe of Israel, a holy race, God's own peculiar people. So ancient writers tell us in their wisdom, who best have known the lineage of men, their kinship and descent. ”

“ Of its thousands, there is not a verse, not a word, but is thick-studded with human emotions, successions of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, of our own antecedents, inseparable from that background of us, on which, phantasmal as it is, all that we are to-day inevitably depends—our ancestry, our past. ”

“ In the cities and in the villages, in the public temples and in the family circles, among all ages and sexes, gladdened voices to-day bespeak grateful hearts and a freshened recollection of the virtues of the Father of his Country. ”

“ She explained what I was not able to comprehend on the previous day, and said: “We have amongst us very few words for conversation: all our children take at their birth the name of the place where they are born. ”

“ To the same description of feelings may be referred that consideration for ancestry, that attention to the line of descent, and that regard to the history and merits of distant kindred, which in the meanest people appears often to assume the character of family pride. ”

“ If so, I hope they will pass it over without reading. Each individual life is molded by one's ancestry, by the incidents of his childhood, the training he receives in the family and the school and the conditions and surroundings of his early days. ”

“ In all the world there isn't another place like the one I am in this summer, and I am getting so familiar with a new kind of natural history that maybe some day I will be an authority on it. Ancestry is the chief asset of Twickenham Town, and though you speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not ancestors it profiteth you nothing. ”

“ Back in the far past we can build up the life of our ancestry—the little kingdom, the queen or her daughter as king maker, the simple life of the royal household, and the humble candidate for the kingship, the priestess with her control of the weather and her power over youth and maid. ”

“ This history professes to inform us how man was placed upon the earth; and how, from one centre, the human family spread itself in various branches into all parts of the world. This genealogy of the human race is accompanied by a chronology, from which it results that the antiquity of the human race does not exceed a few thousand years. ”

“ Let us believe in that sun, and find in its rays an earnest of that glory which was the birthright of our ancestors, and which, should be the birthright of our descendants from generation to generation. ”

“ Lands descend.To hint some of them, their Lands are hereditary, and do descend from Parents to their Children. But the eldest son by Priviledg of Birth-right does not possess and enjoy all the Land, but if the Father please he can divide it among his Children. Yet in case the eldest son does enjoy the Land, then without dispute he is to maintain his Mother and her Children until they come to years or ability to provide for themselves. ”

“ By them it must stand the test of ultimate survival. Some forgotten man in our ancestry—for every begetting man alive was in my individual ancestry and yours three thousand years ago—first dared to think of the world as round,—an astounding temerity. ”

“ The Landed Gentry of England are so closely connected with the stirring records of its eventful history, that some acquaintance with them is a matter of necessity with the legislator, the lawyer, the historical student, the speculator in politics, and the curious in topographical and antiquarian lore; and even the very spirit of ordinary curiosity will prompt to a desire to trace the origin and progress of those families whose influence pervades the towns and villages of our land. ”

“ Because I would like to give a man—an old man your father must be now—the happiness of calling you his son. You say he lives in England. I often go to England on business. Will you not at least tell me your father's name? ”

“ Thus all the great professions would receive their due recognition, and we should presently find so symbolical a combination just as harmonious and dignified, and as pregnant with meaning, as we do the heraldic quarterings by which the mixed blood of ancestry is so proudly displayed. ”

“ I am told, on good authority, that genealogy—which I understand to be the science of proving that your great-grandfather was somebody and that somebody was your great-grandmother—that this science has been nurtured and garnered and brought up to its present state of perfection, or imperfection, by men. ”

“ People united by contiguity, and by the blind sentiment of kinship not yet brought into explicit consciousness, might mark themselves by a badge, and might thence derive a name, and, later, might invent a myth of their descent from the object which the badge represented. ”

“ The beginning of history, as of geography, lies in the child's foundations of experience. In the country village he sees the church, possibly some old cottages, or an Elizabethan or Jacobean house near ”

“ Our ancestors listened to the same legends, ballads, and mythical tales while gathered as children about one and the same mother, and they have handed them down to this generation of the descendants of each so little changed as to furnish ample proof of family relationship. ”

“ You may come to any of its towns a perfect stranger, but with a name known to one prominent citizen, or fortified with a few letters from the right source, and in a time astonishingly short you find yourself at home. ”

“ Pride of ancestry and love of the display of aristocratic claims developed when the hard circumstances of the former years had worn off, and we find the prominent families of the North using book-plates, and having their arms upon their coaches. ”

“ Their parents' parents had been similarly attracted and impelled, and so on back and back through the whole long line of ancestry, through half a million years to primitive men, back beyond them again through the long animal ancestry for scores of millions of years to the beginning of life. ”