Paternal affection

“ And with this affection will grow, according to the immutable law, that the more man gives, the more he loves.
If matriarchy, in a new form, refined by the whole of development, should become the final phase—as in the opinion of many it has been the starting-point—of the family, then this would involve that paternal authority became conditional, depending on the value and warmth of the paternal feeling. At present many fathers are merely an accident in their children’s life, an accident which never even looks “like an idea.” ”

“ The father is apt to feel less paternal tenderness for the child; the child, less filial reverence for the father. Brothers and sisters, when they have been educated in distant countries, are apt to feel a similar diminution of affection. ”

“ The first expansions of the human heart were the effects of a novel situation, which united husbands and wives, fathers and children, under one roof. The habit of living together soon gave rise to the finest feelings known to humanity, conjugal love and paternal affection. ”

“ Next to the priceless jewel of a mother's love, is the watchful care of a father's strong affection. And it seems to me that many boys and young men and older men, too, who have noble and loving fathers, so no always appreciate the love and care bestowed upon them by the parental hand. ”

“ Sweetly does she commend her husband and father to each other's mutual care: her only request to that husband so purely and devotedly loved, and the only words in which she trusts herself to breathe aught of that affection- (yet what a volume of meaning lies therein!) —speak to the inmost soul—"Love my father, were it only for the great love I have borne to you." ”

“ The frequency with which daughters especially were forced to sacrifice their personal preferences in marriage to the ambitions and whims of their father, affords the most striking instance of the former embryonic state of parental affection. ”

“ Frequent meeting with the parents may sap his energy or deprive him of initiative and self-reliance in the manner we have studied: or again, it may cause serious interference with his love life, as where the constant arousal of the not wholly outgrown love impulses to father or mother may appreciably diminish the affection available for husband or wife respectively, thus producing an unhappy marriage. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The affection once seen only in every day attention, as he reaches home, breaks out in unrestrained vehemence. The warm embrace of the hitherto dignified father, the ecstatic pleasure beaming in the mother's eye, the proud welcome of the sister, and the wild enthusiasm even of the old black mammy, crowd on him the knowledge of their love and make him braver, and stronger, and nobler. ”

“ I feel certain that if you will follow its dictates you will soon be able to judge whether it was affection for you which caused your father to pierce your mother’s inmost soul by depriving her of the child she had nourished with her heart’s blood. Can you think of more refined cruelty than to rob a mother of the babe that has lain for months beneath her heart, and that, with the most excruciating pain and with great peril to her own life, has been born into the world? Do you think a father’s affection can excel, or even equal, the love of a mother? ”

“ Had we not known my father we should have loved her better than any one in the world, but affection goes by comparison, and my father spoiled us for any one but himself; indeed, in after life, I remember my mother’s telling me, with many tears, how jealous she had often been of the love we bore him, and how mean she had thought it of him to entrust all scolding or repression to her, so that he might have more than his due share of our affection. ”

“ It would have been difficult for any one but the woman who knew the man before her to have separated his brutish delight in paining her from another feeling she had never dreamt him capable of,—an intense and fierce pride in his affection for his child. And it was the more hopeless to her that it was not the mere sentiment of reciprocation, but the material instinct of paternity in its most animal form. ”

“ There is something touching in the burst of pathetic affection which springs strongly from the heart of a worthy couple, when, seated among their own family, the feelings of the husband and father, the wife and mother, overpower them. ”

“ What the lover is to youth the parents are to childhood—the object of worship and affection, the idol of the heart. It has always seemed to me that a parent is protector and lover blended in one. Towards both we are drawn by the same desire, to make the beloved a part of ourselves, to have complete possession. The disappointment is the same in each case when love is not reciprocated, and we feel an equal readiness to embrace pain and adversity in order to promote the happiness of the beloved. ”

“ Another cause for the lack of affection between parents and children may have been from the custom of the remarriage of parents, the new husband or the new wife drawing the affection away from the children. ”

“ The essentially exclusive nature of marital affection, and the natural desire of every man to be certain of the paternity of the child he supports, render the incursions of irregular passions within the domestic circle a cause of extreme suffering. ”

“ Why then, if man's appetite is to be his sole guide, may not the son select his father's wife, no older than himself, to be the guardian of his children; and pretend that no one can possibly feel so much affection for them as his step-mother and be so suited to be their guide? Then if she bears children it is to one who ought to consider himself her son, and her children would be brothers and sisters to his children. ”

“ For in one way we love our parents, in another our wives, in another our brothers, in another our children, and there is a wide difference in regard to the claims of these feelings of affection, nor is the love of parents towards their children always equal. ”

“ Have I not told you that you can love your husband as much as you please? Is it not a father's duty to direct the affections of his child as I wish to do, and is it not the child's first obligation to submit to its father's will and guidance? ”

“ The affectionate mention he makes of his only descendant, on whom the support of his name and family will devolve, is extremely amiable, and flows in a delicate manner from that virtuous sensibility, by which nature kindly extends the benefits of parental affection, to a period beyond the limits of our lives. ”

“ As between father and son, how many are the cases in which the father, in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son's character familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to complete sincerity and openness with him. ”

“ Neither do they seem to be deficient in natural affection. I have seen both fathers and mothers in the deepest affliction, when their children have been dangerously ill; though I believe the affection is stronger in the descending than the ascending scale, and though custom forbids a father to grieve immoderately for a son slain in battle. ”

“ Whenever it happens that a man is placed in circumstances which produce those associations, he feels the parental affection, without parentage. Facts of this description are so frequent, and so notorious, that 222 it is hardly necessary to produce an instance of them. How else does it happen, that a man who does not suspect the infidelity of his wife, rears as his own, and without any difference of affection, the offspring of the man who has injured him? ”

“ In that case conjugal attachment would come first, as being the feeling through which the family comes into existence as a new social unit, which in many cases consists simply of the original pair. Domestic sympathy, when once formed by marriage, is perpetuated first by parental then by filial affection ”

“ Let us call to assize the loves of our parents, the affection of our wives and children, and they are all dumb shows and dreams, without reality, truth, or constancy. For first there is a strong bond of affection between us and our Parents; yet how easily dissolved! We betake our selves to a woman, forget our mother in a wife, and the womb that bare us, in that that shall bear our Image. This woman blessing us with children, our affection leaves the level it held before, and sinks from our bed unto our issue and picture of Posterity, where affection holds no steady mansion. ”

“ Will the field that never was sown yield to the possessor a plentiful harvest? I do most firmly believe, that to this want of affection in parents to each other may be traced the want of the same feeling in children towards their parents. If a woman hates her husband, her offspring are not very likely to feel a strong attachment to their father; for children inherit, in a strong degree, not only the disposition of their parents, but their mental and physical peculiarities. ”

“ And then there must be a Trunk furnisht, with all manner of linnen and cloaths, with other toys and sweet meats, and mony in his pocket to boot.
Having been some small time there he sends some letters for what he wants. Which is, with recommendations of being saving and diligent, sent unto him. And it is no small pleasure for the Parents, if they do but see that he is an indifferent proficiant. All their delight and pleasure is, when time will permit, to go to their son, and to shew him their great love and affection. ”

“ It is no new observation, I believe, that a lover in most cases has no rival so much to be feared as the father. Certainly there is a jealousy in unparallel subjects, which is little less heart-rending than the passion which we more strictly christen by that name. Mothers' scruples are more easily got over; for this reason, I suppose, that the protection transferred to a husband is less a derogation and a loss to their authority than to the paternal. ”

“ Parents are wrong to check as they do the outgoings of fraternal affection, by separating those whom God has especially joined as the offspring of one father and one mother. God has beautifully mingled them, by sending now a babe of one sex, now of the other, and suiting, as any careful observer may discern, their various characters to form a domestic whole. ”

“ But it mostly happens that the bond of paternity is here, as elsewhere, too strong to be shaken off, and that the uninfluenced and uninterested union of love, when formed in youth, continues even in the decline of age. ”

“ If, however, the relations be conceived as a trifle less normal, if the affection of the parents be uncommonly egotistical or tender, and if the love of the good and dutiful daughter for her husband be far less developed than her well-cultivated feeling of reverence for her father and mother, there arises a problem to be solved, a dramatic collision, and a struggle with an uncertain dénouement. ”

“ He feels, as so many fathers do, the veil of shyness between parent and child, and recognizes how few are the opportunities, in the rough and tumble of life, for the fitly spoken word to confirm "what has been silently indrawn by contact of love." ”

“ You would be my son-in-law; you would be her husband in the eyes of the world. Bah! she has known no happiness, that excuses everything. Our Father in heaven is surely on the side of fathers on earth who love their children. ”

“ While the man is wooing the daughter, this wondrous capability for an absorbing affection strikes him as a very pretty thing. In the first place, it keeps the mother on his side; in the second, he looks forward to supplying this capability with a strictly personal object. At this stage his future mother-in-law is a very pleasant person, for he is uncomfortably conscious of the Beloved One’s father and brothers. ”

“ The father naturally loves his child, but the child niust develop his love for the father from the fear of what the father can do, through awe, dread, dependence, and reverence, to the appreciative and affectionate regard of love. ”

“ But on the other hand, the father, from his distance, supports, protects, nourishes his child, and it is ultimately on the remote but powerful father-love that the infant rests, in a rest which is beyond mother-love. ”

“ As long as she lived and remained unmarried she controlled it, the husband trusting to her affection for her children to make suitable provision for them. He had seen with prophetic anxiety the mother's fond indulgence of their only son, and the practical man dreaded the consequences. ”

“ What deep and sacred emotions are excited in a father’s bosom, when he first becomes convinced that his love for his child is not a mere instinct, but worthily bestowed, and that others, less akin, participate his approbation! ”

“ Recognise that it is your father who speaks to you, your father who has always loved you, and who only desires your happiness. Is it honourable for you to live like husband and wife with a woman whom everybody has had? ”

“ What feelings, what wishes might be supposed to actuate a husband and a father, having so little to bestow on a wife and child he was about to leave behind him? His affections would prompt him to give something to both. ”

“ Ownest wife, am I really a father?—the father of thy child! Sometimes the thought comes to me with such a mighty wonder that I cannot take it in. I love our little Una a great deal better than when I saw her last; and all the love that grows within me for her, is so much added to the infinite store of my love for thee. Ah, dost thou think of me?—dost thou yearn for me?—does thy breast heave and thy heart quake with love for thy husband?—... (portion of letter missing) I can hardly breathe for loving thee so much. ”