HOME.

Alas, for the epidemy to which, few can doubt, ideas are subject! Alas,

for the conflict of prolific geniuses, wherewith the world's quiet is

disturbed! not impossibly, this very book now in progress of inditing

will come to be classed as a "Patch-work," an "Olla Podrida," a "Book

without a name," or some other such like _rechauffee_ publication;

whereas I protest its idea to be exclusively mine own, and conceived

long before its seeming congeners saw the light in definite

advertisements--at least to my beholding. And similarly went it with my

poor epic: scarcely had a general plan suggested itself to my musings,

and divers particular morsels thereof assumed "their unpremeditative

lay;" scarcely had I jotted down a staid synopsis, and a goodly array of

metrical specimens; when some intrusive newspaper displayed to me in

black and white a good-natured notice of somebody else's '_Home, an

Epic_.' So, as in the case of '_Nero_,' and haply of other subjects, had

it come to pass, that my high-mettled racer had made another false

start; that my just-discovered island, so gladly to have been

self-appropriated, was found to have, sticking on one corner of it, the

flag of another king; that the havoc of my brain, subsiding calmly into

the pendulum regularities of metre, was much ado about nothing; and all

those pretty fancies were the catalogued property of another. Such a

subject, too! intrinsically worthy of a niche in the temple of Fame,

besides Hope, Memory, and Imagination, _if_ only one could manage it

well enough to be named in the same breath with Campbell, Rogers, and

Akenside. Well, it was a mental mortification; for I am full of moral

land-marks, and would not (poetically speaking) for the world move

rooted termini into other people's grounds. Whether the field has been

well or ill preoccupied I wot not, having neither seen the poem nor

heard its maker's name: therefore shall my charity hope well of it, and

mourn over the unmerited oblivion which generally greets modern

poetry--yea, upon its very natal-day. Nevertheless, as an upright man

will never wish barefacedly to steal from others, so does he determine

at all times to claim independently his own: to be robbed, and not

resent it (I speak foolishly), is the next mean thing after pilfering

itself; and rash will be thy daring, O literary larcener! (can such

things be?) if thou art found unpermissively appropriating even such

sorry spoil as these poor seedlings of still possible volumes.

Prose and verse are allowed to have some disguising differences, at

least in termination; and as we must not--so hints the public

taste--spoil honest prose, bad as it may be, with too much intermixture

of worse verse, it will be prudent in me to be sparing of my specimens.

Yet, who will endure so _staccato_ a page of jerking sentences as a

confirmed synopsis?--"Well, any thing rather than poetry," says the

world; so, for better or worse, I will jot down prosaically a few of my

all but impromptu imaginings on Home.

After some general propositions, it would be proper to indulge the

orthodoxy of invocation; not to Muses, however, but to the subject

itself; for now-a-days, in lieu of definite deities, our worship has

regard to theories, doctrines, and other abstract idolisms: and

thereafter should follow at length an historical retrospect of domestic

life, from the savage to the transition states of hunters and warriors;

Nimrods and New Zealanders; Actaeons and Avanese, Attilas, Roderics, and

all the Ercles' vein or that of mad Cambyses, Hindoos and Fuegians,

Greece, Egypt, Etruria, and Troy, in those old days when funds and taxes

were not invented, but people had to fight for their dinner, and be

their own police: so in a due course of circumconsideration to more

modern conditions, from ourselves as central civilization, to Cochin

China, and extreme Mexico, to Archangel and Polynesia.

Divers national peculiarities of the _physique_ of homes; as, Tartars'

tents, Esquimaux snow-pits, Caffre kraals, Steppe huts, South-sea

palm-thatch, tree-villages, caves, log-cabins, and so forth. Then, a

wide view of the homes of higher society, first Continental, afterwards

British through all the different phases of comfort to be found in

heath-hovels, cottages, ornees, villas, parsonage-houses, squirealities,

seats, town mansions, and royal palaces. Thus, with a contrastive peep

or two about the feverish neighbourhood of a factory, up this musty

alley, and down that winding lane, we should have considered briefly all

the external accidents of home. The miserable condition of the homeless,

whether rich or poor; an oak with its tap-root broken, a house on

wheels, a boat without a compass, and all that sort of thing: together

with due declamation about soldiers spending twenty years in India,

shipwrecked Robinson Crusoes far from native Hull, cadets going out

hopelessly forever, emigrants, convicts, missionaries, and all other

absentees, voluntary or involuntary. Tirades upon abject poverty, wanton

affluence, poor laws, mendicancy, and Ireland; not omitting some

thrilling cases of barbaric destitution.

Now come we lawfully to descant upon matters more mental and

sentimental--the _metaphysique_ of the subject--the pleasures and pains

of Home. As thus, most cursorily: the nursery, with its dear innocent

joys; the school-boy, holiday feelings and scholastic cruelties; the

desk-abhorring clerk; the over-worked milliner; the starving family of

factory children, and of agricultural labourers, and of workers in coal

mines and iron furnaces, with earnest exhortations to the rich to pour

their horns of plenty on the poor. England, once a safer and a happier

land, under the law of charity: now fast verging into a despotic

centralized system, kept together by bayonets and constables' staves.

Home a refuge for all; for queens and princes from their cumbrous state,

as well as for clowns from their hedging and ditching. The home of love,

and its thousand blessings, founded on mutual confidence, religion,

open-heartedness, communion of interest, absence of selfishness, and so

on: the honoured father, due subordination, and results; the loving

wife, obedient children, and cheerful servants. Absolute, though most

kind, monarchy the best government for a home; with digressions about

Austria and China, and such laudable paternal rule; and _contra_, bitter

castigation of republican misrule, its evils and their results, for

which see Old Athens and New York, and certain spots half-way between

them.

The pains of home: most various indeed, caused by all sorts of opposite

harms--too much constraint or too little, open bad example or impossible

good example, omissions and commissions, duty relaxed by indulgence, and

duty tightened into tyranny; but mainly and generally attributable to

the non-assertion or other abuse of parental authority. The spoiled

child, and his progress of indulgence, unchecked passions, dissipation,

crime, and ruin. Interested interlopers, as former friends, relatives,

flatterers, and busy parasites, undermining that bond of confidence

without which home falls to pieces; the gloomy spirit of reserve,

discouraging every thing like generous open-heartedness; menial

influences lowering their subject to their own base level; discords,

religious, political, and social; the harmful consequence of

over-expenditure to ape the hobbies or grandeur of the wealthier;

foolish education beyond one's sphere, as the baker's daughter taking

lessons in Italian, and opera-stricken butcher's-boys strumming the

guitar; immoral tendencies, gambling, drinking, and other dissipations;

and the aggregate of discomforts, of every sort and kind; with cures for

all these evils; and to end finally by a grand climax of supplication,

invocation, imprecation, resignation, and beatification, in the regular

crash of a stout-expiring overture.

It's all very well, objects reader, and very easy to consider this done;

but the difficulty is--not so much to do it, answers writer, as to

escape the bother of prolixity by proving how much has been done, and

how speedily all might be even completed, had poor poesy in these

ticketing times only a fair field and no disfavour; for there is at hand

good grist, ready ground, baked and caked, and waiting for its eaters.

But in this age of prose-devouring and verse-despising, hardy indeed

should I be, if I adventured to bore the poor, much-abused,

uncomplaining public with hundreds of lines out of a dormant epic; the

very phrase is a lullaby; it's as catching as a yawn; well will it be

for me if my thread-bare domino conceals me, for whose better fame could

brook the scandal of having fathered or fostered so slumbering an

embryo?--Let then a few shreds and patches suffice--a brick or two for

the house: and verily I know they will, be they never so scanty; for

what man of education does not now entertain a just abhorrence of the

Muses, the nine antiquated maiden aunts destined for ever to be

pensioned on that money-making nice young man, Mammon's great

heir-at-law, Prose Prose, Esq.?

With humblest fear, then, and infinite apology, behold, in all sober

seriousness, what the labour of such a file as I am might betimes work

into a respectable commencement; I don't pretend it _is_ one; but

_valeat quantum_, take it as it stands, unweeded, unpruned, uncared-for,

unaltered,

Home, happy word, dear England's ancient boast,

Thou strongest castle on her sea-girt coast,

Thou full fair name for comfort, love, and rest,

Haven of refuge found and peace possest,

Oasis in the desert, star of light

Spangling the dreary dark of this world's night,

All-hallowed spot of angel-trodden ground

Where Jacob's ladder plants its lowest round,

Imperial realm amid the slavish world,

Where Freedom's banner ever floats unfurl'd,

Fair island of the blest, earth's richest wealth,

Her plague-struck body's little all of health,

Home, gentle name, I woo thee to my song,

To thee my praise, to thee my prayers belong:

Inspire me with thy beauty, bid me teem

With gracious musings worthy of my theme:

Spirit of Love, the soul of Home thou art,

Fan with divinest thoughts my kindling heart;

Spirit of Power, in pray'rs thine aid I ask,

Uphold me, bless me to my holy task;

Spirit of Truth, guide thou my wayward wing;

Love, Power, and Truth, be with me while I sing.

_V'la_: my consolation is that somewhere may be read, in hot-pressed

print, too, many worse poeticals than these, which, however, nine

readers out of ten will have had the worldly wisdom to skip; and the

tenth is soon satiated: yet a tithe is something, at least so think the

modern Levites; so, then, on second thoughts, a victim who is so good a

listener must not be let off quite so cheaply. However, to vary a little

this melancholy musing, and to gild the compulsory pill, Reserve shall

be served up sonnet-wise. (P. S. I love the sonnet, maligned as it is

both by ill-attempting friend and semi-sneering foe: of course, in our

epic, Reserve ambles not about in this uncertain rhyme, but duly stalks

abroad in the uniform dress; iambically still, though extricated from

those involutions, time out of mind the requisite of sonnets.) Stand

forth to be chastised, unpopular