Part 2 — A GOOD DAUGHTER. JOHN GORHAM PALFREY.

John Gorham Palfrey was born at Boston in 1796. His ancestors were prominent in the Revolution, and he came of a brave and godly race.

He graduated from Harvard in 1815, and three years later accepted the pastorate of a Unitarian church in Boston. He became engaged in literary work and leaving the ministry took a professorship at Harvard. He held this position for eight years, from 1831 to 1839.

In 1836 he became editor of the “North American Review” and held this position until 1843.

He became interested in politics and was elected a member of the Massachusetts Legislature, and later, Secretary of State. His best literary work was the “History of New England.”

He died at Cambridge in 1881.

A good daughter!—there are other ministries of love, more conspicuous than hers, but none in which a gentler, lovelier spirit dwells, and none to which the heart’s warm requitals more joyfully respond. There is no such thing as a comparative estimate of a parent’s affection for one or another child. There is little which he needs to covet, to whom the treasure of a good child has been given.

But a son’s occupations and pleasures carry him more abroad; and he lives more among temptations, which hardly permit the affection that is following him, perhaps over half the globe, to be wholly unmingled with anxiety, till the time when he comes to relinquish the shelter of his father’s roof for one of his own; while a good daughter is the steady light of her parent’s house.

Her idea is indissolubly connected with that of his happy fireside. She is his morning sunlight and his evening star. The grace, and vivacity, and tenderness of her sex have their place in the mighty sway which she holds over his spirit. The lessons of recorded wisdom, which he reads with her eyes, come to his mind with a new charm, as they blend with the beloved melody of her voice.

He scarcely knows weariness which her song does not make him forget, or gloom which is proof against the young brightness of her smile. She is the pride and ornament of his hospitality, and the gentle nurse of his sickness, and the constant agent in those nameless, numberless acts of kindness, which one chiefly cares to have rendered, because they are unpretending but all-expressive proofs of love.

And then what a cheerful sharer is she, and what an able lightener of a mother’s cares! What an ever-present delight and triumph to a mother’s affection! Oh, how little do those daughters know of the power which God has committed to them, and the happiness God would have them enjoy, who do not, every time that a parent’s eye rests on them, bring rapture to a parent’s heart!

A true love will, almost certainly, always greet their approaching steps. That they will hardly alienate. But their ambition should be, not to have it a love merely which feelings implanted by nature excite, but one made intense and overflowing by approbation of worthy conduct; and she is strangely blind to her own happiness, as well as undutiful to them to whom she owes the most, in whom the perpetual appeals of parental disinterestedness do not call forth the prompt and full echo of filial devotion.