THE PICTURE LAND OF THE HEART
The day is blue above, without a cloud. Will you walk with me through
our village, gentle reader? We will begin at the handsome open square.
Now as we advance my heart leaps at the sight of my birthplace. What a
pretty location it is! Here is "the cot of my father:" "In youth it
sheltered me." It is the "loved spot which my infancy knew." "How dear
to my heart" is this "scene of my childhood." Happy childhood thus early
blessed with blessings hereditary to all after hours! There is no place
so suggestive and interesting in our adult years as that in which we
began life. It is one of those exquisite situations which paint their
own picture insensibly in the memory while you look on them, natural,
daguerreotypes, as it were. Considered only as a house, it left some
things to be desired but it is never to be considered only as a house.
Why is it that we thus love the place of our birth? Why have all men
done the same? The son of the mist, in Scott, in his dying hour, begged
that he might be turned so that his eyes could rest once more upon his
native hills and close with their latest vision fixed there. Why did the
hero of Virgil, in his death hour, manifest his love for the place of
his birth which is so beautifully narrated by that immortal bard? It is
an instinct, which gives to it a place in the human heart, and such an
expression in human thought. Like poetry it is born with us, not made.
There probably is no stronger feeling in us than that of attachment to
our first home. A man transplanted to another field may have succeeded
well. His condition may have been vastly improved and yet he may have
drooped without apparent cause, in his temporary home, pining for those
days which were passed in the Eden of his life. I could not get enough
of the place. Must I leave thee, dear sacred spot, how can I leave thee?
My heart was full and the tears started to my eyes as I gazed around
upon every object. The words of my earliest progenitor, on leaving our
ancestral garden, as quoted by Milton, came to me, "Must I leave thee,
paradise?"
_The Vine Must Have the Wall_
Luther could appear in battle scenes for social and religious reform
with undaunted spirit. He could oppose the enemies of his faith without
a trembling nerve. He could resist those, bent on his destruction, with
the courage and calmness of a Christian hero, but when upon a journey
to meet the Counts of Mansfield, he came in sight of his own native
Eisleben, the great man was overcome with emotion and he bowed his head
and wept.
"_The Man Returned who Left these Haunts a Boy_"
Congress voted unanimously in 1824 to invite Lafayette to visit this
country. He was received everywhere with great demonstrations of popular
enthusiasm and his progress through the country resembled a continuous
triumphal procession. He visited, in succession, each of the twenty-four
states, and all the principal cities which vied to do him honor, but
relatively he was unmoved. A splendid coach was at his service. He
passed beneath an elaborate arch blazoned with words of welcome, but
Lafayette relatively was unmoved. Sitting quietly with no expectation
excited, before a screen in a public assembly, the curtain lifted and
there stood his birthplace, in speaking beauty and suggestiveness and
all the deeps of his heroic nature were broken up and he sobbed audibly
like a child. The strong old home still held him to its heart.
How is such a birthplace marked? Chiefly by a gush of rich emotion in
the heart of him who claims it as his own. Nature attends to that. A boy
has warm affections. A birthplace may have no Forefathers' Rock.
Peregrine White was not born there. No Charter Oak or Washington Elm,
with living dignity may identify the place. There may be no cellar which
concealed the royal judges, nor any door pierced by Indian bullets, nor
drums which awaked the sleepers at Lexington and Concord, yet it is
distinctively sacred to one's childhood days. It has the deep endearment
of a darling home.
"I remember, I remember
The house where I was born
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn."
"Where is my home? I want to go before dark," said a spirited little
fellow of three years. The action of his inner nature was like the
turning of the needle to the pole. Thus an unfortunate child will put up
a fight for his birthright and he will not yield without returning to
the struggle. He wants his heritage.
[Illustration: "I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER, THE HOUSE WHERE I WAS BORN"]
_The Gate to Life_
Somehow my heart keeps flying back to my birthplace as Antony's kept
flying back to Egypt. If a man has no heart, if he is altogether lacking
in veneration the attention given to his birthplace by other persons
would impress it upon his notice. "Where were you born?" asks the life
insurance agent. What has that to do with it? How does that affect the
situation? Why does he not limit himself to vital statistics, like
your age, habits, general health? Through more than three thousand
closely printed pages, Who's Who in America, carefully mentions in each
biography the birthplace of the subject. There must be some reason for
making this one of the chief facts when the space is needed to tell of
positions held, wealth and fame acquired.
At this point a daily paper comes to my desk containing an interesting
recital touching America the Beautiful. We are informed that Miss Bates
"has a most sympathetic personality" and "is a native of Falmouth on
Cape Cod." Are the song and person better or different from that which
they would have been if instead of Falmouth the birthplace had been
Yarmouth or Barnstable or Wellfleet Several towns in France are
disputing the honor of being the birthplace of General Foch. The papers
and magazines speak of his genius, of his responsible position, the most
distinguished in military history, of his never-resting blow-on-blow
method of conquering, but they cut the thread of an interesting
narrative short, to consider the question of his birthplace as if that,
after all, was a principal question. It seems that "the Lord shall count
when he writeth up the people that this man was born there." Agents and
learned men, and it appears even the deity, attach significance to the
place of one's birth. So then will I.
"Dear native village, I foretell,
Though for a time I say farewell,
That wheresoe'er my steps shall tend,
And whensoe'er my course shall end,
My soul will cast the backward view,
THE LONGING look alone on you."
But there are spots on the sun. There's a fly in the ointment. I am
suffering from an incurable complaint. I was born too soon. I cannot now
put the clock back. Besides we are entering on a new era. There is to be
an overturning. Society and the ways of government and the methods of
business are to be changed and I want to be a witness and would like to
be a factor. The temper of each generation is a surprise. This new
period is to be different in its ideals, employments, and conditions and
I would like to be entirely of it.
_Footprints on the Sands of Time_
I took up the other day a book of fiction that is equally the delight of
the child and of the man and opened it where a picture represented the
surprise of Robinson Crusoe at discovering the print of a man's foot on
the seashore. On revisiting the earth it touches one's emotion after
being orphaned, islanded, for a generation from one's father to come
upon his footprints in his old haunts. Without the experience of it, on
visiting an early home, no one would imagine, what a shadowy train of
memory, involving all the past, would come crowding before his eyes,
filling his heart with a pleasant pain, and a sweet bitterness. Only
once stand in the old environment and feel the atmosphere of early
living conditions and a vivid panorama of faces that it was thought had
vanished and scenes that it was supposed had faded will unroll "when
fond recollection presents them to view." I hardly realized how sweet
those memories were to me until my visit. I began to see that one must
get away from home, be exiled for a while, to gain a pensive mood.
Homesickness is in reality a spiritual instinct, a needed, useful force.
Howard Payne felt its power when living in a garret in Paris, on the
edge of starvation, he longed for his "lowly thatched cottage again," as
David longed for a drink of the water of the well of his birthplace,
which is by the gate of Bethlehem. This locality was the playground of
my childhood. It is connected with the sweetest ties that can bind one's
thoughts to the past. I stand in a fixed position. This is the location
of my earliest recollection. Here memory began. This was a new birth.
Commencing in the community and continuing all along thereafter, by
inquiry, I have sought widely to ascertain at what point in the lives of
other persons, recollection made a start. From his biography by his
daughter I learn that my whilom instructor, Professor Austin Phelps,
remembered Napoleon's death, an event that occurred when he was two.
Franklin says he was a reader from his infancy. Samuel Johnson, before
he was two, had begun to take a permanent hold upon events. One of my
associates recalls a theatric incident that occurred when he was two. My
recollection made no registration until after I was three and this was a
scene here in my father's new unfinished church, and among its primitive
temporary seats which were without backs. Thus I stand where my outlook
on the world began. At that point I see myself for the first time in my
career. Other events follow in close order but it has been a great
pleasure that my angel mother and her beloved church are ineffaceably
pictured on the front page of my book of remembrance.
_Things Sweet to Remember_
To discover that modest House of Prayer in which my father began his
ministry was like a miracle, like finding someone who had risen from the
dead. My eye was not satisfied with seeing it twice or thrice. I
contemplated it as I would the "House not made with hands," I could have
kneeled and kissed the threshold of this historic but very lowly temple.
It seemed a construction transported, ready-built into this world and
located in one of its most delightful spots. It seemed different, like
a piece of meteoric stone which for a fact appears here but whose
home has been in the skies, and like the stony pillow on Judea's plain
it became to my vision a House of God. This is a holy land to me. It
savors of the assemblies of the saints. If I were looking for beauty I
would return to that divine abode. A stranger not knowing the
antecedents of the little sanctuary would discern no form nor comeliness
in it. It was an hour when one could think of but two things, one was
home, and one was heaven. These earthly objects have a comeliness, a
simple dignity, and nattiness which are beyond the reach of art. How it
elevates the spirit to stand, thrilled by a beautiful romance and find
that it is not romance at all but unspeakably sacred reality.
"Aye call it holy ground
The soil where first they trod."
[Illustration: THE LITTLE SANCTUARY]
Oh the brave, the noble souls who have laid foundations. They were elect
people set apart to a sacred service which has no equal in this world's
history. I am not "the wretch
Who never to himself hath said
This is my own my native land."