“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
This quote has no known author and is recorded as an anonymous proverb.
About this quote
Bowring wrote it as a hymn for domestic life, and the image is exact rather than sentimental: the household is a small copy of the thing people mean when they say heaven. It names one particular kind of happiness rather than happiness in general, and it reads best as the Unitarian devotional writing it was.
Source: Matins and Vespers