Familiar

“ Familiar with the father, filial with the mother, paternal with the son, tender and almost brotherly with the young girls, he inspired and felt in this small domestic circle all those sentiments that only an ardent soul inspires and feels by spreading abroad its sympathies. ”

“ If the family he belongs to be spoken of, probably but a part of it will be represented in thought: under the necessity of attending to that which is said about the family, we realize in imagination only its most important or familiar members, and pass over the rest with a nascent consciousness which we know could, if requisite, be made complete. ”

“ In the overwhelming grief which had come to me, life appeared a void; a vacuous, heavy-footed thing, with moments of suspended thought, a merciful numbness of despair, a sound, a familiar sight, a rush of memory, a freshet of tears, each overlapped the other, so fast they followed. One of the unpardonable and most resented slights to those in affliction is the even tenor with which the world wags on its way, callous and indifferent. ”

“ Upon an open litter carried in the hands of these soldiers it lay, the little angel face of rarest possible loveliness, wreathed with flowers that are pale and fair, but not so fair and pale as itself. The little dead hands full of white flowers are raised and clasped in a supplicating attitude, the little heavenly form, just the fatal and familiar size, is robed in a trailing white satin shroud, and over this unearthly vision shines the burning sun with mocking glare, and upon it stare the passers-by with indifferent faces through which no broken heart has ever looked. ”

“ The suggestion that the Devil was a man, wearing either an animal's skin or a mask in the form of an animal's head as a ritual disguise, accounts as nothing else can for the witches' evidence as to his appearance and his changes of form. A confusion, however, exists from the fact that the witches, and therefore the recorders, usually spoke of the familiars as the Devil; but in almost every case the disguised man can, on examination of the evidence, be distinguished from the animal familiar. ”

“ A vision of my youth comes over me—a happy boyhood—a tree-embowered home, babbling brooks, fertile lawns—a father's blessing—a mother's kiss that was both joy and blessing—a brother's brave and tender friendship—and first love, that dearest, sweetest, holiest charm of all. ”

“ The whole human family would be bound together by the sense of a common nature, and the bonds of sincere affection: in a word, they would feel that they were bone of each other’s bone; and flesh of each other’s flesh ”

“ What a new light on old relationships—brother and brother, brother and sister, father and child, husband and wife, all thoughts of God, all being gradually entered into, appropriated, realised, understood, worked out by us. They seem so common and natural, and yet they are intensely awful and sacred and mysterious. ”

“ If you have neither father, mother, brother, sister, child, husband, or wife, in the wide world, still there is some neighbor, some companion, whose eye, fixed upon you, is moved, perhaps unknown to themselves, for good or for evil. ”

“ You will remember those, who have been for ever cut off from the sweetest pleasures of life; whose lips have never learned to say—"father"—"mother,"—and to behold the countenances of these dearest friends lighten up with joy at the sound, and their arms extended for the fond embrace. ”

“ I remember once to have read in some French author that the attachment we feel to home, the sacred names of son and brother, are not more than the instincts of habit; that natural affection, as it is called, has no real existence; and that it is the mere force of repetition that forms the tie by which we love those whom we call father or mother. ”

“ But a family that ruins itself to save the honor of a name, a mother who lets her children go one by one to do their duty, a young man who prefers the charm of a pure marriage to the temptations of a sensual love—what interest have such people for us? ”

“ You find yourself all of a sudden introduced into the midst of a large family, with aunts and cousins to the third and fourth generation, and grandmothers both by the father’s and mother’s side;—and a very odd set of people they are, but people whose real existence and personal identity you can no more dispute than your own senses, for you see and hear all that they do or say. ”

“ It has been made the time for gathering together family connections, and drawing closer those bands of kindred hearts, which the cares, and sorrows, and pleasures of the world are continually operating to cast loose; of calling back the members of a family who have launched forth into life, and wandered far asunder, once more to assemble around the parental hearth, that rallying place of the affections, there to grow young again among the endearing remembrances of childhood. ”

“ The mother, the wife, the sister, the relative should share with the husband, the son, the brother, the kinsman, in the world's honors, in the sufferings, sorrows, and miseries incidental to all. They are part and parcel of man, and partake of his nature and his position, as of his fortune. ”

“ As husbands, fathers, brothers, sons, friends, they were ideal, cleanly of body and of mind, with heads filled with sentiment and hearts filled with sympathies; their personal lives were like their homes and their gardens—revealing only the brightest things of this world, the singing, humming, sweet-smelling things which so strongly speak to us of the other world we are yet to know. ”

“ The family is one of nature’s masterpieces. ”

“ And we, embracing within our little selves (as did the tusk whence that ball was cut) countless conflicting forces, the inextricably intermingled traits, that is, of numberless ancestors,—fashioned, too, by the loving hands of father, mother, brother, sister, teacher; we spin forth on the journey of life. ”

“ When my imagination goes from myself to my father, it passes not so readily from him to his second wife, nor considers him as entering into a different family, but as continuing the head of that family, of which I am myself a part. ”

“ Have these solid, excellent people aught to say against the faithful devotion of a wife, or the patient tenderness of a mother, which are corner-stones of the family, as the family is the corner-stone of all true civilization? ”

“ Barring all the selfishness that chills like east winds the world, the whole human family is bathed with an element of love like a fine ether. How many persons we meet in houses, whom we scarcely speak to, whom yet we honor, and who honor us! ”

“ Will not the mother meet her darling child, and know and love it as her own? Will not husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, meet there in tender and loving embrace, and remember and renew the relation they sustained in the natural world? ”

“ Oh, you’ll have pictures taken together in loving attitudes, go to parties and all that—send each other flowers at proper times. But you’ll never be like the ‘family’ towards each other and, when you are [178] older, you will realize the singular honor it has been to become one of the family so readily. ”

“ And so my gentle little travelling companion with a woman's quick imagination, begins to weave a romance of misfortune and penury, in which the little tout figures as the heir of a noble but decayed family. ”

“ When again in private life we see a whole family one by one dropping into the grave under the Ate of some inherited malady, and the parents perhaps surviving them, do our minds ever go back silently to that day twenty-five or thirty years before on which under the fairest auspices, amid the rejoicings of friends and acquaintances, a bride and bridegroom joined hands with one another? ”

“ And look a while upon a picture there:
⁠'Tis of a lady in her earliest youth,
The last of that illustrious family.
He who observes it, ere he passes on,
Gazes his fill, and comes and comes again,
That he may call it up when far away. ”

“ The ideal is the family, all dwelling together in sweetest harmony and content, with a common board, and a common fireside in the twilight of the day, and all the sweet fellowship that these stand for. ”

“ Have you been saving more than one life?”
“Not more than one—a good deal less than one. Don’t let us get into a sentimental strain, pater. You are the chartered—ah, the chartered sentimentalist of the family. ”

“ That the intimate family life which sometimes resulted—especially when, as frequently happened, the seeming mutual devotion was also real—might often be regarded as beautiful and almost ideal, it has been customary to repeat with an emphasis that in the end has even become nauseous. ”

“ In contemplating these, we seem to expatiate in a vast gallery of family pictures, and take delight in comparing the various features of the extensive kindred as they resemble or differ from each other, and through the physiognomy piercing into the heart, we find them though dead, yet speaking and pleasing companions. ”

“ It is impossible to tell you all the little exquisite instances of kindness and attention we have received from this excellent family. The respect, affection, and admiration with which, à propos to everything great and small, they remember my father and mother, is most touching and gratifying. ”

“ Perhaps the first lesson one draws from their contemplation is the eternity, so to speak, of the family affections. No words nor work have ever portrayed a regard more tender than is shown in these family groups, in which the person about to depart is represented in a sitting posture, while his nearest friends or relatives stand near, expressing in their countenances and action the sorrow and pathos of the final separation. Here an aged father gives the last blessing to the son who survives and mourns him. ”

“ Since her earliest recollection, others have ministered to her wants and pleasures. From a father's hand, childhood and youth received their countless natural blessings; and brother or husband, in later years, has stood between her and the rough winds of a stormy world. ”

“ Some may laugh at the singularity of this strange family—may consider it an evidence of weakness to pay such regard to the silly requisitions of a superstitious ancestor—deny themselves so many comforts—make themselves so singular—engage those with whom they married to conform to the rules of their house, and instil the same into their children from generation to generation! ”

“ Let the Family, furthermore, be viewed as the home of pure social affections, the school of expanding intelligence, the sphere of unbought art, the scene of joyous employment, and we feel in that single sentiment, a fulness of action, of life, of being, which no scientific social contrivance can ensure, nor selfish accident supply. ”

“ Before you permit an acquaintance with any man to develop into anything like intimacy, you must know about his past. And by past, I mean parentage—family—ancestors, as well as his own personal record. ”

“ May it be that as husband and wife, parent and children, master and servant, family and home lose more and more of their ancient and intense significance, the old imperfect feelings will be transmuted into love for fatherland. ”

“ Are there not sons and daughters who have parents living with them as angels unawares,—husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, in whom the material for a beautiful life lies locked away in unfruitful silence,—who give time to everything but the cultivation and expression of mutual love? ”

“ Almost equally universal is the belief that close relatives, as being ingredients in—or perhaps rather partakers of—the same whole, the family, are bound together in a quite material solidarity of suffering. ”

“ I allude to untiring love and charity between not only members of one household, but all relations or connexions, however distantly connected. One seldom or ever hears of a father and his children being on bad terms, or of quarrels and broils between sisters and brothers. ”

“ This simple family, born and bred in retirement, and wholly unacquainted with what is called the world—a conventional phrase which, being interpreted, often signifieth all the rascals in it—mingled their tears together at the thought of their first separation ”

“ In the child's evening prayer, the famous "Prière pour tous," not only for father and mother, but for the poor, the forsaken, the bad—the idea of the family broadens into the idea of the whole great human family. ”

“ And truly we have been born into a beautiful inheritance. Our fathers have bequeathed to us the appreciation of a kindly and a holy spirit; a spirit of affectionate unobtrusive meekness, of considerate friendliness, of calm cheerfulness. ”

“ One of the most lovely and beautiful features in a family circle is the aged father or mother sympathizing in the joys and sorrows of the young, and watching for occasions to please and serve all around. ”

“ They remind us of what our families have done in all parts of the world, and there is not one you do not associate with some friend or relative who is gone away, or with some great merrymaking, or with the death of one who was dear to you. ”

“ Who, Agni, is thy kin, of men? who is thy worthy worshipper? On whom dependent? who art thou? 4. The kinsman, Agni, of mankind, their well beloved Friend art thou, A Friend whom friends may supplicate. ”