Year: 1873

Among the miseries which for various reasons we agree to treat rather with ridicule than with sympathy, few are more acute than those connected with a change of house. Itwould be curious inquiry why any evils which in them selves are real and serious should be re- garded as placing their victim beyond the circle of common humanity. Sea- sickness involves as much unhappiness for the time as the loss, say, of first cousin if more transitory, it is more acute for the moment, for few people lose their appetite for day on the death of relation, and still less do they contemplate suicide as desirable under the circumstances. Yet one of these is almost an invariable, and the other a very common, result of sea-sickness. We sympathize, it would seem, only with those forms of suffering which are susceptible of poetic treatment and in other cases we feel-to alter the ordina- ry saying-that there is comic side to the misfortunes of our best friends. This excuse, whatever its value, is not quite sufficient to account for the cal lous indifference with which we gener- ally regard the victim of change of houses For surely there is something poetical about the feelings of human being torn from the pulling which has become almost part of himself. He is not, we assume, about to cross the ocean, or to break off any habit of fa- miliarity. He Is merely moving to a distance of few hundred yards, be- cause some intrusive railway has de- molished his former dwelling-place or because an increase of his family, or a desire for better accommodation, or the imperious wish of the ladies of his household, has compelled him to shift his anchorage. However slight the change may be, he is breaking innumer- able threads of association, of whose force he was never before sensible. For many of them, it is probable that he is hopelessly unable to account. He cannot tell how many social meetings have hal1owed particular rooms for him, and left behind an odor perceptible to the imagination, if not to the senses. He can only dimly guess that certain marked stages in his domestic life have been connected in the background of his consciousness with particular rooms or pieces of furniture. Hawthorne ar gues in the "House of the Seven Ga bles" that all this attachment to old places is an old-world superstition and that in the coming days we shall be wiser, and change house with the same facility as we now change a coat. Our remote descendants will revert to the nomad state, though their tents will be made of brick and mortar instead of canvass. They will scorn to be bound by sentiment to any particular plot of ground. It is hard to prophecy what may be the mental condition of our re- mote posterity. A day may come when patriotism and family feeling may be regarded as idle superstitions and in that era, an attachment to any special lump of matter will be a weakness of which every luminary of the twenty somethingth year will be heartily ashamed. But meanwhile every person in whom the imagination is not quite an obsolete faculty clings more or less to an ancient domicile. He feels per ceptible wrench upon quitting it; and is painfully sensible that he is passing one more milestone on his road to the grave.-Ihe Saturday RevieaU.