Homeland

“ In the soft evening-hour, after the duties of the day are over, you may sit at the door of your own mansion, and while the cool sea-breeze is breathing upon you, and the new moon is hanging in beauty over the western waters, you will look across that ocean, and — thinking of the land of the whites that lies beyond — you will bless the day you left it, to come to the home of. your fathers, the rich country which Providence has set apart for the colored race. ”

“ Love of country, of family, of the home hearth, feelings at war with all your ideas, are written in every line of their firm brows—their spirit lives entire in me, their last heir and representative. Tell me, O man without ancestors, where is your natal soil? You spread your wandering tent each coming eve Upon the ruins of another's home, every morning roll it up again that it may be unrolled anew at night to blight and spoil! ”

“ The beginning of civilization was when the mother bid the rude men of the forest and hill to build the needed shelter in grove or cave to protect her and her helpless offspring. And from that simple shelter or thatched-roofed hut has sprung the vine-clad cottage, and the marble palace, and the family roof-tree of every house in every land. It was the mothers of men who filled up the broken ranks of war, and brought peace, and wove garments, and refined and civilized man and taught him the arts and commerce of civilized life. ”

“ Our home,—our birth place,—our native land,—think for a while what the virtues are which arise out of the feelings connected with these words; and if thou hast any intellectual eyes thou wilt then perceive the connection between topography and patriotism.
Shew me a man who cares no more for one place than another, and I will shew you in that same person one who loves nothing but himself. Beware of those who are homeless by choice! You have no hold on a human being whose affections are without a tap-root. ”

“ A strong desire to seek his future weal,
In emigration to that distant shore
Where flow great rivers, and loud cataracts roar;
Where mighty lakes afford the fullest scope
For future commerce, and the settler's hope.
Go with him to his home in the wild woods—
That rude log cottage where he stored his goods;
Paint faithfully the scenes through which he passed,
And how he settled in a town at last;
What then befel him in successive years,
Or aught which to thee suitable appears,
To make his history such as may be read
By high-born race, or those more lowly bred. ”

“ Patriotism has two roots, the love of clan and the love of home. In migratory tribes the former alone counts; in settled communities diversities of origin are often forgotten. But the love of home, as we know it, is a gentler and more spiritual bond than clanship. The word home is associated with all that makes life beautiful and sacred, with tender memories of joy and sorrow, and especially with the first eager outlook of the young mind upon a wonderful world. ”

“ What right have we to an homestead in the red man's country? Let us return to the land of our fathers, and leave this soil untarnished by the footprint of him who hath a white skin! What right have the hosts of foreign emigrants, who are flocking to our shores, to an homestead among ourselves? ”

“ The dwellers in this crowded house, with their vision of space and sunlight; the village with its vision of a city; the city with its vision of a country; the country with its vision of a republic of the world—all these universal struggles were condensed now into the little space of a man's consciousness. ”

“ This great unpeopled country, where men are so urgently needed, was gladly sending of its best to “the Old Country”—“home,” as they tenderly call it, with a depth of sentiment incomprehensible here, and incomprehensible to anyone who does not know and feel his own patriotism awake and flourish on alien soil. ”

“ We are not, as a race, social and confiding, like the French and Italians and Germans. We have a word for home, and our home is often a moated grange, an island, a castle with its drawbridge up, cutting us off from all but our own home-circle. ”

“ That the culture of nomad peoples is lower than that [8] of pastoral tribes; that pastoral tribes advance in culture when they become agricultural; that agriculture, implying settled habits and fixed homes, leads to the foundation of cities and the formation of civic life; that the city-states of the ancient world give way to the nation-states of modern times: are all accepted facts, bridging the apparent chasm between civilisation and savagery, and demonstrating the action of the law of continuity in the evolution of society. ”

“ The traveller, who may have occasion to cross their thresholds, will seldom witness the semblance of poverty, or the shadow of discontent. Since my arrival in the country, I have not beheld a single trace of anxiety or care in the countenances of the people. In the city, the town, the village, and the open country, every eye sparkles with contentment, and every tongue speaks the language of independence. ”

“ And yet why should I use such a term when the best I can say is that a continent is my home? Home suggests a loved familiar nook in the great world. There is no such niche for me, nor can I recall any place around which my memory lingers with especial pleasure. ”

“ Two thousand miles westward from the rock where their fathers landed, may now be found the sons of the Pilgrims, cultivating smiling fields, rearing towns and villages, and cherishing, we trust, the patrimonial blessings of wise institutions, of liberty, and religion. The world has seen nothing like this. Regions large enough to be empires, and which, half a century ago, were known only as remote and unexplored wildernesses, are now teeming with population, and prosperous in all the great concerns of life; in good governments, the means of subsistence, and social happiness. ”

“ America is my birth-place and my home. Home has two significations, a restricted one and an enlarged one; in its restricted sense, it is the place of our abode, it includes our social circle, our parents, children, and friends, and contains the living and the dead ”

“ And how could one more nobly symbolize the sacredness of Home? There can be no home without the sense of permanence, and without home there is no civilization—as England will discover when the greater part of her population have become flat-inhabiting nomads. ”

“ Everywhere one may see here old parsonages by the side of ivy-mantled churches, and the comfortable mansions where generations of country squires have lived in peace, while their sons have gone forth to fight England's battles, and carry her flags of war and commerce all over the world. We in America can hardly be said to have such a possession as a family home. ”

“ To receive into one great common home millions of sons and daughters strange to that home and to one another in speech, custom and land, and to blend them into one people, this seems an impossible task. ”

“ Land where gaunt and haggard women live alone and work like men,
Till their husbands, gone a-droving, will return to them again:
Homes of men! if home had ever such a God-forgotten place,
Where the wild selector’s children fly before a stranger’s face. ”

“ Here, too, are clusters of emigrants who have fled, unacquainted with the refinements, and uncontaminated by the old world, to seek for that bread and peace, which the progress of luxury and the change of manners denied them at home. Here they come in kindly confederation, resolved to cherish in those kindred groups, which have left with social sorrow their native mountains, the customs and traditions, the language and the love of their ancestors, and to find comfort in that religion which has ever been their support and their shield, for all that they have left behind. ”

“ The settlement of colonies in uninhabited countries, the establishment of those in security, whose misfortunes have made their own country no longer pleasing or safe, the acquisition of property without injury to any, the approbation of the waste and luxuriant bounties of nature, and the enjoyment of those gifts which heaven has scattered upon regions uncultivated and unoccupied, cannot be considered without giving rise to a great number of pleasing ideas, and bewildering the imagination in delightful prospects ”

“ I hold it no honor to be praised in my own village, nor disgrace to be decried in my native State. Gain brings me no joy, loss no sorrow. I dwell in my home as if it were a mere caravanserai, and regard my native district as though it were one of the barbarian kingdoms. ”

“ I doubt not that, if the emigrant had remained at home, it would have taken a thousand years to attain the same general development now reached by the free States of North America* The settlers carried with them the best ideas and the best institutions of their native land— the arts and sciences of England, the forms of a representative government, the trial by jury, the common law, the ideas of Christianity, and the traditions of the human race. In the woods, far from help, they were forced to become self-reliant and thrifty men. ”

“ This continent is the great family mansion which God has built and furnished with unlimited supplies for the purpose of reassembling the scattered members of the human family, to enjoy together the fruits of liberty, fraternity and prosperity. ”

“ You love your country because your home is a part of it; and you love your home because it is your individual haven of refuge from the storms of life—the individual kingdom in which you are lord and master and in which you enjoy, with your wife, your children, and your friends, whatever happiness life can give. ”

“ In returning to your firesides, which in a short time you intend to abandon, choosing for your new home and that of your children the land of the Holy Cross, where it was my fortune to be born, say to your countrymen that in this land there are generous hearts that sympathize much with the southern inhabitants of the United States of North America. ”

“ All the country, as far as eye can reach, is the property of two or three noble families, dwelling in turreted halls; while the bulk of the population, the wretched tillers of the soil, live, as of old, in mud hovels, in the depth of human ignorance and misery. ”

“ I can but look with some degree of solicitude on the effect on civilization and on the home, of palatial hotels, and great school buildings, filled with heterogeneous masses of children, in which love, solicitude and sacrifices, each for all, have little opportunity for growth and development. The family seems to be the sacred unit of civilization and morality. ”

“ Home would cease to be home; family ties would prove to be bonds of straw; communities could not be held together; the vast fabric of society would dissolve, and smiling countries would once more be the abode of savages. ”

“ We may say in all truthfulness that there never was a time when the home wielded a greater influence than during the colonial period of American history. For the home was then indeed the center and heart of social life. ”

“ Like those of the Roman republic, and build a cottage on each of them, and cover his land with a simple, innocent, and smiling population, who shall owe, not only their happiness, but their existence, to his benevolence. ”

“ House by house, village by village, the character of a civilization changes as the character of the individuals change. When we begin to build up a lofty world within the national soul, soon the country becomes beautiful and worthy of respect in its externals. ”

“ There was, indeed, a connecting link between the two states of being we have described, afforded by the old hereditary nobility of the land, many members of which still lingered by the ancestral hall, as yet unallured from the calm delights of rural life, and the dignified satisfaction of dwelling amongst their own people, even by all the amusements or luxuries of the capital. ”

“ The Advancing Wave of Civilization HAVE you ever carefully watched the movements or caught the earnest spirit of the immigrant who, after traveling many hundreds of miles along the difficult roads through an unbroken country to a strange land, there seeks a spot where he may build a home for his family? ”

“ These were all signs of habitation, yet no one moved about, no stir or bustle denoted that there were dwellers within. How different from the country life of our great houses in England, with trains of servants and equipages hurrying hither and thither—all the wealth and magnificence of the great capital transported to some far-off county, that ennui and fastidiousness, fatigue, and lassitude, should lose none of their habitual aids! Well, for my part, the life among green trees and flowers, where the thrush sings, and the bee goes humming by, can scarcely be too homely for my taste. ”

“ The homes of the nation mean the [174] life of the nation. No stream can rise higher than its fountain, and as we build our homes so our land will prosper. God has given us a picture of what Heaven may be, and He has given it in the shape of a perfect home. ”

“ We have no large houses, as you have, to worship the Great Spirit in: if we had them to-day, we should want others to-morrow; for we have not like you a fixed habitation—we have no settled home except our villages, where we remain but two months in twelve. ”

“ If we trace the nations of Europe from their former state of barbarism to their present moral elevation, we shall find the same causes to have always operated. The first step has always been the acquisition of permanent habitations, and the consequent love of country and of home. Domestic comforts warmed into life the social virtues. ”

“ The folkland is what our scholars have called ethel, and alod, and family-land, and yrfeland; it is land held under the old restrictive common-law, the law which keeps land in families, as contrasted with land which is held under a book, under a 'privilegium,' modelled on Roman precedents, expressed in Latin words, armed with ecclesiastical sanctions, and making for free alienation and individualism. ”