But I have seen scores and scores of women leave school, leave their piano and drawing and fancy-work, and all manner of pretty and pleasant things, and marry and bury themselves.  You hear of them about six times in ten years, and there is a baby each time.  They crawl out of the farther end of the ten years, sallow and wrinkled and lank,—­teeth gone, hair gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,—­freshness, and vivacity, and sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous, gone, gone, gone forever.  This our Tract-Society book puts very prettily.  “She wraps herself in the robes of infantile simplicity, and, burying her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood, patiently awaits the sure-coming resurrection in the form of a noble, high-minded, world-stirring son, or a virtuous, lovely daughter.  The nursery is the mother’s chrysalis.  Let her abide for a little season, and she shall emerge triumphantly, with ethereal wings and a happy flight.”

But the nursery has no business to be the mother’s chrysalis.  God never intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon.  If He had, He would have made her a caterpillar.  She has no right to bury her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood.  It will surely be required at her hands.  It was given her to sun itself in the broad, bright day, to root itself fast and firm in the earth, to spread itself wide to the sky, that her children in their infancy and youth and maturity, that her husband in his strength and his weakness, that her kinsfolk and neighbors and the poor of the land, the halt and the blind and all Christ’s little ones, may sit under its shadow with great delight.  No woman has a right to sacrifice her own soul to problematical, high-minded, world-stirring sons, and virtuous, lovely daughters.  To be the mother of such, one might perhaps pour out one’s life in draughts so copious that the fountain should run dry; but world-stirring people are extremely rare.  One in a century is a liberal allowance.  The overwhelming probabilities are, that her sons will be lawyers and shoemakers and farmers and commission-merchants, her daughters nice, “smart,” pretty girls, all good, honest, kind-hearted, commonplace people, not at all world-stirring, not at all the people one would glory to merge one’s self in.  If the mother is not satisfied with this, if she wants them otherwise, she must be otherwise.  The surest way to have high-minded children is to be high-minded yourself.  A man cannot burrow in his counting-room for ten or twenty of the best years of his life, and come out as much of a man and as little of a mole as he went in.  But the twenty years should have ministered to his manhood, instead of trampling on it.  Still less can a woman bury herself in her nursery, and come out without harm.  But the years should have done her great good.  This world is not made for a tomb, but a garden.  You are to be a seed, not a death.  Plant yourself, and you will sprout.  Bury yourself, and you can only decay.  For a dead opportunity there is no resurrection.  The only enjoyment, the only use to be attained in this world, must be attained on the wing.  Each day brings its own happiness, its own benefit; but it has none to spare.  What escapes to-day is escaped forever.  To-morrow has no overflow to atone for the lost yesterdays.