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Sometimes a worse darkness gathers round, till I long for one of those intense and all-absorbing creeds which somehow seem to tend the brightest hearth-fires which earth knows: for philosophy, though it invented the void, never built a little Gidding.
'Should fortune cheat you with the apples of Sodom, return to your home again. Its doors will ever be open, and its hearth-fires bright for you as of old. Ah, do the fires still burn? How many years have passed since I went forth! And Ellen? Even if she be living and unchanged in her affections, I can never lay this false heart at her feet.
When the smoke of houses will cease, their hearth-fires having been extinguished, when husking-rods will be kept aside, and all the inmates will have taken their food, when mendicants and guests will cease to wander, I shall select a moment for my round of mendicancy and solicit alms at two, three, or five houses at the most. I shall wander over the earth, after breaking the bonds of desire.
Or if we went to Gibraltar, it was interesting to wonder why we had gone, and to be so glad of getting back, and after dinner joining a pleasant international group in the long reading-room with the hearth-fires at either end which, if you got near them, were so comforting against the evening chill.
Day after day he stood looking about him, examining and studying in little all the strange things which he saw; seeking to learn as much as might be of the timorous savages, who in time began to straggle back to their ruined villages; talking, as best he might, through such interpreting as was possible, with savages who came from the west of the Messasebe, and from the South and from the far Southwest; hearing, and learning and wondering of a land which seemed as large as all the earth, and various as all the lands that lay beneath the sun that West, so glorious, so new, so boundless, which was yet to be the home of countless hearth-fires and the sites of myriad fields of corn.
Light of welcoming hearth-fires, shadows of children's play upon the walls; light of affections in which there are no decay and no deceit; shadows of sacred retirement where God alone is; light of joys which this world's storms cannot utterly quench; shadows of sorrow around sick-beds, and in vacant places, that still make home the dearer as the arena of earth's purest discipline and of its most triumphant faith!
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