IF YOUR MOTHER IS YET YOUNG,

you have many years of her great friendship before you.  Try and pattern after her boundless affection.  Let it melt into your heart and make it warmer.  If “age has snowed white hairs” upon her head, treasure her the more fondly during the few swift years she will be left to you.  Soon she will go to her reward, and you will be without the only friend of man whose love seems to be inalienable—­whose esteem he cannot barter away, either in greed or in vice.

THE MOTHER OF MOTHERS.

In almost every community there is “a mother in Israel,” a mother of mothers, whose great heart is like the ocean, and claims the outpourings of every stream of life.  To these grand souls of virtue and goodness let every man bow in reverence, for they are mothers to the motherless.  When the Reaper came forth to reap he aimed to take the richest sheaf, but lo! the mother in Israel gathered the orphans together, and poured out her tenderness upon them.

[Illustration]

LOVE.

     Had we never loved sae kindly,
     Had we never loved sae blindly,
     Never met or never parted,
     We had ne’er been broken-hearted!—­Burns.

     Dear as remembered kisses after death,
     And sweet as those for others; deep as love. 
     Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
     O Death in Life! the days that are no more.—­Tennyson.

Love, says Cowley, “is a great passion, and therefore I hope I have done with it.”  I think most people will agree with this sentiment.  Love is such a tyrant, it leaves common sense so little to say, that the majority of people are heartily glad when reason returns to her throne and the thrilling lunacy is a remembrance instead of a fact.  The remembrance is sweet, and has no angry thorn, no peremptory mandate.  The young man is going along in the full enjoyment of his life, when suddenly a huge coiled spring, the existence of which has not attracted his notice, is loosed in his breast, his whole intellectual forces centre on the attainment of one object, and a mental strain begins which is of the exact nature of madness, and has ever been termed so by people who have looked at things merely by what they have seen.  In the highly-feverish state of the brain the nerves of the whole system soon become involved, the stomach refuses to perform its functions, and physical emaciation and deep melancholia rapidly ensue.  The obvious reason is the insane state of the brain.  Nature has suddenly impressed that organ with the one idea that a certain fair maid is actually without the faults of her associates.  She is the prize of the whole world!  Had the world the information of her perfections which is lodged in this young man’s secret brain, there would be a war of extermination for her possession—­a second sack of Troy at the very least.  Deep pity for other men with wives, who cannot marry this maiden, and pity for young men who have seemingly preferred other maidens, intermit with joy that all the world has been so blind.