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The cairn

Chapter 139: Refinement.
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About This Book

A compact miscellany of short essays, anecdotes, prayers, poems, and biographical sketches that collects reflections on grief, maternal love, benevolence, virtue, taste, and historical episodes. The pieces alternate personal memories, moral aphorisms, humorous and touching anecdotes, and brief portraits of public figures, often framed as letters, epitaphs, or short narratives. Recurring themes include the effects of sorrow and joy, domestic affection, charity, the vicissitudes of fortune, and the consolations of faith and art. The tone moves between intimate recollection and light moralizing, presenting varied, self-contained vignettes meant to instruct, console, and amuse.

Refinement.

Those who rail at poetry and refinement as superfluous ingredients in every day happiness, little know what main props they thus seek to undermine. These will abide when even principles wave. Manly delicacy is as necessary in family life as manly rectitude; and womanly tact as womanly virtue. There is as much happiness wrecked from the absence of the one, as of the other, and perhaps more. Those who neglect the varnishes of life, commit an insidious sin towards themselves: and these lie in the mind, and not in the purse.