| Home Making |
Chapter 9 |
Page 13 |
It may truly be said that no home ever reaches its highest blessedness and sweetness of love and its richest fullness of joy till sorrow enters its life in some way. The best home music can be brought out only in the fire of trial. Did you ever sit on a winter’s evening before an old fashioned open fireplace with its andiron and its blazing log of wood? As you sit there and watch the fire playing about the log you begin to hear a soft sound, a clear musical note perhaps, or a tender quavering strain, plaintive and sad. It takes every tone as the evening passes. Sometimes it sounds like a whole chorus of bird songs; sometimes it dies away into a faint murmur. What is it? Are there birds hidden in the chimney that give out these strange notes? Are there invisible spirits hovering about the room, that breathes out these plaintive strains? No, the music comes from the log in the fire. The flames bring it out. If you are of a poetical turn of mind you will imagine that long ago in the forest the birds sat on the branches of the tree from which this back log was taken, and sang there, and there songs hid away in the wood, where they have remained ever since. Or you will fancy that the winds sighed and murmured through the branches in gentle summer breezes, or swept through them in furious storms, and that the music of the breezes or of the storms has been imprisoned in the heart of the tree all these many years. And now in the hot flames all this long slumbering music is brought out.
This may be but a pretty poetic fancy, so far as the weird music of the log on the hearth is concerned; but it is no mere fancy that the sweetest, fullest music of the home is not drawn out until the fires of trial come. The bird notes of joy that warble about the ears in the sunny days of childhood and youth sink away into the heart and hide there. The lessons, the influences, the gladness, the peace, of quiet, prosperous days, seem to have been lost. The life does not appear to yield its true measure of joyfulness. Then the fires of trial kindle about it, and in the flames the long gathering and imprisoned music is set free and flows out. We all know lives of which this is the true history. The world’s richest songs have been sung in the midst of the hot fires. What is true of individual life is true also of household life. Our love for one another may be true and deep in the sunny days, but it never reaches its richest development until pain or suffering touches us and calls out all the hidden wealth of affection. The mother’s love for her child, rich and deep as it is, never attains its full wondrousness of self denial and sacrifice until the child is sick or in some pain and the mother bends over it in yearning solicitude and unselfish ministry. The same is true of all the home affections. It is the fire that brings out the imprisoned music. The household that has endured sorrow in the true spirit of faith and resignation comes out of it with richer and tenderer love. Husband and wife that bend side by side over a dead child are drawn to each other as never before. The other children are dearer to the parents after one has been taken. Brothers and sisters grow more patient and thoughtful toward one another when their circle has been broken. An empty chair has a wonderful power to soften home hearts and refine the feelings of nature.
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