" "There is in all this cold
and hollow world," says Mrs. Hemans, "no fount of deep, strong,
deathless love, save that within a mother's heart." "Even He that died
for us upon the cross," says Longfellow, "in the last hour, in the
unutterable agony of death, was mindful of his mother, as if to teach us
that this holy love should be our last worldly thought--the last point
of earth from which the soul should take its flight for heaven." Who
ever saw
A MOTHER ROMPING WITH HER THREE-YEAR-OLD
that did not look upon her as one of the happiest, therefore,
necessarily, one of the best of God's creatures? O, in that peek-a-boo,
that capturing of that last squealing "pig," the little toe, that
paddy-cake opera, is there not the one great bliss of life, to be happy
in making others happy? And how the laughter rings through the house!
And then the toil and self-denial for the stocking and the tree
AT CHRISTMAS!
Is it any wonder that the child is so easily deceived, and credits all
his joys to unseen ministers? It would not be hard to convince the
philosopher himself of the dual earthly character of the mother, visibly
a woman, invisibly but not the less really to her child, an ethereal
spirit of mercy and goodness! What gnaws her cheek and cheats Death into
the belief a flag of truce summons him to the final parley? Has not her
babe, her hope, been fevered and in pain, and should she sleep lest it
should leave her on this world behind, that then would need her not?
"Canst bind the sweet influences of the Pleiades?" No more can her
anxiety be
FETTERED INTO SLEEP;
no more can her quick ear be deafened to the little wail that echoes
pitiful within the chambers of her heart! When we remember the great
passion of motherhood, the intensity of the drama, the prolongation into
years of its deep interplots, we cannot marvel longer at the perennial,
lasting character of the mother's love.
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