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,"