Mother, dear mother, no unmeaning rhyme,
No mere ingenious compliment of words,
My heart pours forth at this auspicious time:
I know a simple honest prayer affords
More music on affection's thrilling cords,
More joy, than can be measured or express'd
In song most sweet, or eloquence sublime.
Mother, I bless thee! God doth bless thee too!
In these thy children's children thou _art_ blest,
With dear old pleasures springing up anew:
And blessings wait upon thee still, my mother!
Blessings to come, this many a happy year;
For, losing thee, where could we find another
So kind, so true, so tender, and--so dear?
Is it an impertinence--I speak etymologically--to have dropped that
sonnet here?--Be it as you will, my Zoilus; let me stand convicted of
honesty and love: I ask no higher praise in this than to have pleased my
mother.
* * * * *
Penman as I am, have been, and shall be, innumerable letters have grown
beneath my goose-quill. Who cannot say the same indeed? For in these
patriotic days, for mere country's love and post-office prosperity,
every body writes to every body about every thing, or, as oftener
happens, about nothing. Nevertheless, I wish some kind pundit would
invent a corrosive ink, warranted to consume a letter within a week
after it had been read and answered: then should we have fewer of those
ephemeral documents treasured up in pigeon-holes, and docketed
correspondence for possible publication. Not Byron, nor Lamb, nor West,
nor Gray, with all their epistolary charms, avail to persuade my
prejudice that it is honest to publish a private letter: if written with
that view, the author is a hypocrite in his friendships; if not so, the
decent veil of privacy is torn from social life, confidence is rebuked,
betrayed, destroyed; and the suspicion of eaves-droppings and casual
scribblings to be posthumously printed, makes silence truly wisdom, and
grim reserve a virtue. This public appetite for secret information, and,
if possible, for hinted scandal--this unhallowed spirit of outward
curiosity trespassing upon the sacred precincts of a man's own
circle--is to the real author's mind a thing to be feared, if he is
weak--to be circumspectly watched, if he is wise. Such is the present
hunger for this kind of reading, that it would be diffidence, not
presumption, in the merest school-boy to dread the future publication of
his holiday letters; who knows--I may jump scathless from the Monument,
or in these Popish times become excommunicated by special bull, or fly
round the world in a balloon, or attain to the authorship of forty
volumes, or be half-smothered by a valet-de-place, or get indicted for
inveterate Toryism, or any how, I may--notwithstanding all present
obscurities that intervene--wake one of these fine mornings, and find
myself famous: and what then? The odds at Tattersall's would be twelve
to one that sundry busy-bodies, booksellers or otherwise, would scrape
together with malice prepense, and keep _cachet_ for future print, a
multitude of careless scrawls that should have been burnt within an hour
of the reading. Now, is not this a thing to be exclaimed against? And,
utterly improbable on the ground of any merit in themselves as I should
judge their publication (but for certain stolidities of the same sort,
that often-times have wearied me in print), I choose to let my author's
mind here enter its eternal protest against any such treachery regarding
private