He himself spoke of the hourly interchange of the smaller acts of kindness with the several members of his family, as having a claim upon his time as strong as those other public occupations of his life which seemed to others so much more serious and important.
But the man whose affections are quickened by home-life, does not confine his sympathies within that comparatively narrow sphere.

His love enlarges in the family, and through the family it expands into the world.

"Love," says Emerson, "is a fire that, kindling its first embers in the narrow nook of a private bosom, caught from a wandering spark out of another private heart, glows and enlarges until it warms and beams upon multitudes of men and women, upon the universal heart of all, and so lights up the whole world and nature with its generous flames." It is by the regimen of domestic affection that the heart of man is best composed and regulated.

The home is the woman's kingdom, her state, her world--where she governs by affection, by kindness, by the power of gentleness.

There is nothing which so settles the turbulence of a man's nature as his union in life with a highminded woman.