| Home Making |
Chapter 6 |
Page 8 |
There is another example of a devoted and romantic friendship between brother and sister in the Korners. The brother, Paul Theodor Korner, holds no mean place among German poets. He died at twenty two, falling in battle. His life was blessed by his sister’s devotion, and her strong affection was nobly returned by him. They lived in mutual confidence. Their friendship was itself “a rare and lovely idyl of grace and beauty.” His premature death killed her. She could not bear the shock nor live without him. She survived him only long enough to complete his portrait and to draw with the pencil of love a sketch of his last resting place. They sleep side by side, so that in death as in life they are not divided. Mrs. Hemans has commemorated the story of their devotion in these lines:
“Thou hast a hero’s tomb; a lovelier bed
In hers, the gentle girl beside thee lying,
The gentle girl that bowed her fair young head
When thou wert gone, in silent sorrow dying.
Brother, true friend! The tender and the brave–
She pined to share thy grave.
“Fame was thy gift from others;–but for her,
To whom the wide world held that only spot,
She loved thee! Lovely in your lives ye were,
And in your early deaths divided not.
Thou hast think oaks, thy trophy;–what has she?
Her own best place–by thee.”
The history of life is not all written. Here and there in many a quiet home there is a friendship between bother and sister, on which God’s angels look with admiring love, which realizes all that is tender and beautiful in human attachment and affection. Yet I do not think I write a rash word when I say that such friendships are rare. Ofttimes the intercourse of brothers and sisters in the home lacks even the graces of ordinary civility. As soon as the door shuts them within, restraint is thrown off; selfishness comes to the surface, courtesy is laid aside. There is no pleasant conversation. Neither lives for nor tries to please the other. The speech is rude or careless and the whole bearing cold or indifferent. The better nature is hidden and the worse comes to the surface. Instead of a tender idyl of grace and beauty the intercourse of brother and sister is a harsh and painful discord. It should not be so. Brothers and sisters should live together as intimate friends, should carefully win and sedulously keep each other’s love, dwelling together in unity and tender affection. There is no friendship in the world so pure, so rich and helpful, as that of the family, if only it be watched and tended as it should be.
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