Shall it be said that beings endowed with high intellectual powers, sustaining the most important relations, created for social enjoyments, and made but a little lower than the angels--shall it be said that their local attachments are less tenacious than those of trees, and birds, and beasts, and insects? I know that the blacks are classed, by some, who scarcely give any evidence of their own humanity but their shape, among the brute creation: but are they _below_ the brutes? or are they more insensible to rude assaults than forest-trees? 'Men,' says an erratic but powerful writer[AE]--'men are like trees: they delight in a rude [and native] soil--they strike their roots downward with a perpetual effort, and heave their proud branches upward in perpetual strife. Are they to be removed?--you must tear up the very earth with their roots, rock and ore and impurity, or they perish. They cannot be translated with safety. Something of their home--a little of their native soil, must cling to them forever, or they die.' This love of home, of neighborhood, of country, is inherent in the human breast. It accompanies the child from its earliest reminiscence up to old age: it is written upon every tangible and permanent object within the habitual cognizance of the eye--upon stone, and tree, and rivulet--upon the green hill, and the verdant plain, and the opulent valley--upon house, and garden, and steeple-spire--upon the soil, whether it be rough or smooth, sandy or hard, barren or luxuriant. 'Like ivy, where it grows, 'tis seen To wear an everlasting green.' The man who does not cherish it is regarded as destitute of sensibility; and to him is applied by common consent the burning rebuke of Sir Walter Scott: 'Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne'er within him burned, As home his footsteps he hath turned, From wandering on a foreign strand! If such there breathe, go, mark him well; For him no Minstrel raptures swell; High though his titles, proud his name, Boundless his wealth as wish can claim; Despite those titles, power, and pelf, The wretch, concentred all in self, Living, shall forfeit fair renown, And, doubly dying, shall go down To the vile dust, from whence he sprung, Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.' Whose bosom does not thrill with pleasurable emotion whenever he listens to that truest, sweetest, tenderest effusion,--'Home, sweet home?' ''Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home; A charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, Which, seek thro' the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere. Home--home! Sweet, sweet home! _There's no place like home!_