Homecoming

“ An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain;
Oh, give me my lowly, thatched cottage again.
The birds singing gayly that came at my call;
Give me them, and with the peace of mind, dearer than all.
Home! home! sweet, sweet home!
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home.
How sweet, too, to sit ’neath a fond father’s smile,
And the cares of a mother to soothe and beguile,
Let others delight ’mid new pleasures to roam,
But give me, oh, give me, the pleasures of home!
Home! home! sweet, sweet home!
There’s no place like home, there’s no place like home. ”

“ The effect of boarding upon our own soul may best be seen by contrasting our reactions to our geography, according as we wake in the morning to find ourselves at home, in a friend’s home, or in a boarding-house. At home our attitude toward the ensuing day is one of absolute sincerity,—we expect to be our best self or our worst, for frankness is the chief comfort of kinship; if, on the other hand, we open our eyes in somebody’s guest chamber, we marshal our forces to insure our good behavior, we owe it to our host to put out best foot foremost ”

“ I should have set out the next day, but, a family with whom I had made acquaintance expecting to proceed to New York within a week, I consented to be their companion, and, for that end, to delay my departure.
Meanwhile, I shut myself up in my apartment, and pursued avocations that were adapted to the melancholy tenor of my thoughts. The day preceding that appointed for my journey arrived. It was necessary to complete my arrangements with the family with whom I was to travel, and to settle with the lady whose apartments I occupied.
On how slender threads does our destiny hang! ”

“ There came upon her that strange sense of home-coming, which comes to us in dreams, when love comes back to us across the sundering years, and all the pains of life, the pains of death, vanish and are gone, and we are come home—home to the place where we would be. ”

“ Then, the domestic felicity enjoyed in a quiet, cheerful country house, surrounded by one's own family, and every now and then a good neighbour and sincere friend dropping in, has always been to me that sort of exquisite enjoyment which I could never find in any other situation, or in any other occupation. My natural taste is so domestic, that I should not wish, on my own account, ever to mingle in the busy haunts of man. ”

“ At home again, to enact the part of a butt for her mother’s nagging and ever-discontented tongue; at home again, to fall into the old rôle of self-obliteration, to hold herself in readiness to sacrifice every inclination of her own, to devote all her time, all her energies, to the convenience of the family idol, her younger sister, and especially to look for no appreciation of, or thanks for, the same. ”

“ But I knew that both were eagerly expected by their parents to spend the holidays at home, and that a change and rest were necessary after their year's work at their books. I therefore met them both together and said:
"Why do you not prefer to go home for a time?" ”

“ When you are at a long distance from home, in the midst of a little carnival, home news are received for the first moment with joy—then with mistrust. You know what is coming. It is like the moment before the ball leaps into its cell. ”

“ We must get home, where, as we nod and drowse,
Time humors us and tiptoes through the house,
And loves us best when sleeping baby-wise,
With dreams—not tear-drops—brimming our clenched eyes,—
Pure dreams that know nor taint nor earthly stain—
We must get home—we must get home again! ”

“ It is a pleasant sensation to come back to something familiar. I am beginning to feel at home in college, and in command of the situation; I am beginning, in fact, to feel at home in the world—as though I really belonged in it and had not just crept in on sufferance. ”

“ One thing is plain,—the worldly-prosperous learn with most difficulty the secret of home-rest; whoever loves show has not the true home-love in him.
Those are the happiest family circles which are bound together by intangible, spiritual ties, in the midst of care, poverty, and hard work, it may be. ”

“ I was visiting in a house where fashionable people made life a perpetual holiday. Yet of all the pleasures which followed so rapidly, one upon another, that I have difficulty now in separating them into distinct impressions, the greatest, the only one I never confounded with any other, was the hour I spent in my window after the day’s dissipations were all over, watching—what? Truth and the necessities of my story oblige me to say—a man’s face, a man’s handsome but preoccupied face, bending night after night over a study-table in the lower room of the great house in our rear. ”

“ Home seems a different thing; before, one has been but a sort of guest after all, only welcomed and indulged, and little festivities held in honor of the released and happy child. But to come home for good,—to have done with school and boyhood,—is to be a guest, a child no more. It is to share the everyday life of cares and duties; it is to enter into the confidences of home. Is it not so? I could have buried my face in my hands and wept!
My father, with all his abstraction and all his simplicity, had a knack now and then of penetrating at once to the heart. ”

“ When in the fitful pauses of busy life our feet wander back to the old homestead, and, crossing the well-worn threshold, stand once more in the low, quaint room, so hallowed by her presence, how the feeling of childish innocence and dependence comes over us, and we kneel down in the molten sunshine, streaming through the western window — just where long years ago we knelt by our mother's knee, lisping "Our Father." ”

“ It's the time of day I want to be at home with my family. I envy every man I see in such a home, and I contrast his condition, surrounded with his wife and children, and a long night of rest before him, with my work. ”

“ All this is delightful, no doubt; every bit as good as being at home. Our aim, in fact, is to carry home with us—to feel as if we had never left No. 24. The closer the resemblance between our country lodgings and our town-house, the better we are off; for we then get what we have come for—change of air—without any sacrifice of comfort. ”

“ Home!— how could he call a strange house "home"? The house where his fathers, he, and his children were born. To be given up to a stranger! It was intolerable but an inevitable fact. Sadly the bright cold Christmas they were to spend in their old, and once happy home. And their feasting? Let us not look in on their poverty that blessed day. That was the most sumptuous banquet in the land to them on this holy day, and the darling of their hearts tempest - tossed on the raging seas perhaps—oh, horrible thought!—his precious body the prey of voracious monsters of the deep? ”

“ Acceptances to the Home-coming kept flowing in like mad—all the folks we’d most wanted to come was a-coming, them and their families. I begun to get warm all through me, and to go{294} round singing, and to wake up feeling something grand was going to happen and, when I was busy, to know there was something nice, just over the edge of my job, sitting there rosy, waiting to be thought about. ”

“ I long to be with you again and to see you all at home. I fear I dote on home too much, but mine is such an uncommon home, such a delightful home, that I cannot but feel strongly my privation of its pleasures. ”

“ And in the meanwhile, where is art, nay, where is even comfort? Shall we not very soon have overshot the mark, and find our lives becoming little short of a pilgrimage from hotel to hotel? An English lady, whose husband owned estates in all parts of England, Scotland, and Wales, and who had at least six country-houses, each claiming the advantages of family residence during a short part of the year, once said to a friend less plentifully encumbered: “My dear, I envy you. ”

“ RIGHT HERE AT HOME. Right here at home, boys, in old Hoosierdom,
Where strangers allus joke us when they come,
And brag o' their old States and interprize—
Yit settle here; and 'fore they realize,
They're "hoosier" as the rest of us, and live
Right here at home, boys, with their past fergive! ”

“ There is something about the word Home, which in itself is pleasant. How delightful is it to him upon whose locks have fallen the snows of many winters, and whose brow has been furrowed by the hand of time, to look back to the home and friends of his childhood! Every thing about the old homestead is interesting to him. Here, surrounded by kind friends and dear relatives, he spent the happiest hours of his life. Every spot has some attraction. ”

“ When your master and lady go abroad together, to dinner, or on a visit for the evening, you need leave only one servant in the house, unless you have a blackguard boy to answer at the door, and attend the children if there be any. Who is to stay at home is to be determined by short and long cuts, and the stayer at home may be comforted by a visit from a sweetheart, without danger of being caught together. ”

“ The glow of this consciousness even in so small an organism was part of the charm of these retreats offered me cityward upon our base of [Pg 72] provisions; a part of the rest of which, I disengage, was in my fond perception of that almost eccentrically home-loving habit in my father which furnished us with half the household humour of our childhood—besides furnishing him with any quantity of extravagant picture of his so prompt pangs of anguish in absence for celebration of his precipitate returns. ”

“ Thus fun is kept going by a few, chasing sleep away from many who fain would dream of home. "Home!" the word we left behind us, and the word we go to seek; the word that charms the weary wandering ones more than all others, for there are found the sweetest if not the richest comforts of life. ”

“ Occasioned by the words of a dying friend,—"before morning I shall be at home."
Home! Home! its glorious threshhold
Through parted clouds I see,
Those mansions by a Saviour bought,
Where I have long'd to be,
And lo! a bright unnumber'd host
O'erspread the heavenly plain,
Not one is silent—every harp
Doth swell the adoring strain. ”

“ In the home the family gets up plenty early enough, songs and jokes, kisses and love pats are found, the family is on time, and there is happiness all around.
Homes are sweet, because love is present. Houses built by gold are just hotels. ”

“ All this warm-hearted, unconventional kindness goes far to make the stranger forget his “own people and his father’s house,” and feel at once at home amid strange and unfamiliar scenes. After all, “home” is portable, luckily, and a welcoming smile and hand-clasp act as a spell to create it in any place. ”

“ And remember, when you go home afterward, not a word to your mother! And not a word to-morrow, or ever—to any one! You've simply done as you told your employer you were going to do—spent the night at home. ”

“ No, no; I was not leaving home behind, I was flying homeward now. Home, home to Caddagat, home to ferny gullies, to the sweet sad rush of many mountain waters, to the majesty of rugged Borgongs; home to dear old grannie, and uncle and aunt, to books, to music; refinement, company, pleasure, and the dear old homestead I love so well.
All in good time I arrived at the end of my train journey, and was taken in charge by a big red-bearded man, who informed me he was the driver of the mail-coach, and had received a letter from Mrs Bossier instructing him to take care of me. ”

“ This class of travelers leave their homes, not for information and improvement, but for the opportunity of grumbling, on a new and more extensive scale than can be attained in their own families. They leave home in search of some yet untried cause for grumbling, and by a long stretch of conscience and imagination they contrive to find it, and return with a large store of freshly gathered material, over which to expatiate for some weeks, quite to the relief of their families. ”

“ Travel not so oft nor so far from home again! Ill luck attends that home whence the master often wanders. Dost thou remember my loud laugh on that day when thy wife broke the girdle stone? It was because she made a fool of thee by blinding thine eyes that her lover might escape unseen. Be wiser in future, and never leave home ”

“ "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in." ”

“ They bring the wanderer to his home, the child to his mother’s arms, the ox to his stall, and the weary laborer to his rest. But to the gentle-hearted youth who is thrown upon the rocks of a pitiless city, ‘home [Pg 123] less amid a thousand homes,’ the approaching evening brings with it an aching sense of loneliness and desolation, which comes down upon the spirit like darkness upon the earth. ”

“ I am a long time reconciling to town after one of these excursions. Home is become strange, and will remain so yet awhile; home is the most unforgiving of friends, and always resents absence; I know its cordial looks will return, but they are slow in clearing up. ”

“ And this is the reason so many husbands travel beyond seas; or at home go from town to town, or from tavern to tavern, to look for company! and in a word, to spend any thing, to live any where, save at home, in their own houses, where they are sure to hear nothing but the brawlings of a scolding woman. ”

“ If there was none of the trim propriety, or that neatness that rises to elegance, which I had seen in my father's household, there was a lavish profusion here, a boundless abundance, that, contrasted with our mode of life, made us seem almost mean and penurious. Guests came and went unceasingly, and, to all seeming, not known to any one. An unbounded hospitality awaited all comers, and of the party who supped and caroused to-night, none remained on the morrow, nor, perhaps, even a name was remembered. ”