"When I Contemplate My Wife, By My
Fire-Side, While She Either Spins, Knits, Darns, Or Suckles Our
Child, I
Cannot describe the various emotions of love, of gratitude,
or conscious pride which thrill in my heart, and often overflow
In
voluntary tears ..." He is like that old classmate's of
Fitzgerald's, buried deep "in one of the most out-of-the-way
villages in all England," for if he goes abroad, "it is always
involuntary. I never return home without feeling some pleasant
emotion, which I often suppress as useless and foolish." He has his
reveries; but they are pure and generous; their subject is the
future of his children. In midwinter, instead of trapping and
"murthering" the quail, "often in the angles of the fences where the
motion of the wind prevents the snow from settling, I carry them
both chaff and grain: the one to feed them, the other to prevent
their tender feet from freezing fast to the earth as I have
frequently observed them to do." His love of birds is marked: this
in those provinces of which a German traveller wrote: "In the thrush
kind America is poor; there is only the red-breasted robin. ...
There are no sparrows. Very few birds nest in the woods; a solemn
stillness prevails through them, interrupted only by the screaming
of the crows." It is good, after such a passage as this has been
quoted, to set down what Crevecoeur says of the bird kingdom. "In
the spring," he writes, "I generally rise from bed about that
indistinct interval which, properly speaking, is neither night nor
day:" for then it is that he enjoys "the universal vocal choir." He
continues - more and more lyrically:
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