is pleasing to us.  It is a bitter cup we love to drink; we love to keep open the wounds there inflicted.  The sadness we then feel we dearly cherish; and we linger around these tombs as if bound to them by some mystic chord we could not break; we are loth to leave a spot in which are accumulated the fondest associations of early life.  Would the mother, if she could, forget the child that slumbers beneath the flower-crowned sod of the family cemetery?  “Where,” in the beautiful language of Irving, “is the child, that would willingly forget the most tender of parents, though to remember be but to lament?  Who, even in the hour of agony, would forget the friend over whom he mourns?  Who, even when the tomb is closing upon the remains of her he most loved and he feels his heart, as it were, crushed in the closing of its portals, would accept consolation that was to be bought by forgetfulness?  And when the overwhelming burst of grief is calmed into the gentle tear of recollection, when the sudden anguish and the convulsive agony over the present ruins of all that we most loved, is softened away into pensive meditation on all that it was in the days of its loveliness, who would root out such a sorrow from the heart?  Though it may sometimes throw a passing cloud even over the bright hour of gayety, yet who would exchange it even for the song of pleasure or the burst of revelry?  No; there is a voice from the tomb sweeter than song; there is a recollection of the dead to which we turn even from the charms of the living!” How passionately we cling to those memories of a sainted mother, which crowd in rapid succession upon our minds!

  “Weep not for her!  Her memory is the shrine
    Of pleasing thoughts, soft as the scent of flowers,
  Calm as on windless eve the sun’s decline,
    Sweet as the song of birds among the bowers.”

What a purifying and restraining influence does the memory of a pious parent’s love, exert upon the wayward child!  When he bends in mournful recollection over the grave of a sainted mother, how must every heart-string break, and with what remorse he reviews his past life of wickedness and filial disobedience.  The memory of that mother’s love and kindness to him, haunts him in all his revels, and draws him back, as if by magnetic force, from scenes of riot and of ruin.  Can he think of that mother’s prayers and teachings and tears of solicitude, and not feel deeply, and often savingly, his own guilt and ingratitude?  If there is a memory of home-life which allures him to heaven, it is the recollection of her love and pious efforts to save him.