MOTHER.

     A mother is a mother still,
     The holiest thing alive.—­Coleridge.

     Not learned save in gracious household ways,
     Not perfect, nay, but full of tender wants,
     No angel, but a dearer being, all dipt
     In angel instincts, breathing Paradise.

     Who looked all native to her place, and yet
     On tiptoe seemed to touch upon a sphere
     Too gross to tread, and all male minds perforce
     Swayed to her from their orbits as they moved,
     And girdled her with music.  Happy he
     With such a mother! faith in womankind
     Beats with his blood.—­Tennyson.

So high and holy a title as mother cannot fall too reverently from man’s lips.  That he might live the mother has gone down into the valley of the shadow of death; that he might thrive she has fed him with willingness from her own weak body, and grown spectre-like as he grew strong and importunate; that he might go among his fellows on an equal footing, she has toiled with his small weak brain teaching him the beginning of his education and tilling “a rank unweeded garden;” that he might have everlasting life, she has instilled into his mind that saving fear of God, which, though he think himself an atheist, will claim the mastery when Death grins by his couch, and grant him a stay of the awful judgment till he may make his peace with a Creator whose mercy endureth forever.  Everything a man is he can owe but to his mother; everything he may be in future life has possibly come from her fond intercession, her gentle admonitions.  “Unhappy is the man for whom his own mother has not made all other mothers venerable,” says Richter.  “The future destiny of the child,”

SAYS NAPOLEON,

“is always the work of the mother,” and it is certain that he had ample reason in his own remarkable career for making this important admission.  He inherited from his mother all those attributes which made him great, and owed his sudden downfall to none of her teachings.  She was noted for her sagacity and prudence, but possibly it required more than human sagacity and prudence to balance the mighty impulses which moved Napoleon Bonaparte.  “A father may turn his back on his child,” says Washington Irving, “brothers and sisters may become inveterate enemies, husbands may desert their wives, wives their husbands; but a mother’s love endures through all; in good repute, in bad repute, in the face of the world’s condemnation, a mother still loves on, and still hopes that her child may turn from his evil ways, and repent; still

SHE REMEMBERS THE INFANT SMILES