CORNELIA, daughter of Scipio Africanus, and wife of Tiberius
Gracchus, was left a widow, with a large family of young children.
She refused all subsequent offers of marriage, even when Ptolemy of
Egypt wished to share his throne with her. Her two sons, Tiberius and
Caius, the tribunes who achieved such greatness and fame, owed every
thing to her judicious training, to her wise and unwearied pains in
educating them, guarding them, and inspiring them to high deeds. She
was almost idolized by the Roman people, and occupied, indeed, the
proudest position of any woman in the history of her country. Her two
sons venerated, and invariably took counsel with their mother.
It is evident that their inner lives were shared with her. One of
them was known to have dropped, at her request, a law which he meant
to urge through the Senate. Cicero says that Catulus pronounced a
public panegyric on his mother, Popilia, the first time such a thing
was done in Rome. In a less formal manner, Caius Gracchus often
publicly spoke the praises of his mother, Cornelia. When her sons
were murdered, she bore the cruel affliction with imposing
magnanimity. Departing from Rome, she took up her abode at Misenum,
where, in the exercise of a queenly hospitality, she lived,
surrounded by illustrious men of letters, as well as by others of the
highest rank and distinction. Universally honored and respected, she
reached a good old age, and finally received at the hands of the
Roman people a statue inscribed, Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi.
Notwithstanding her somewhat meddlesome and despotic temper, Queen
Olympias seems to have maintained an intimate friendship with her
son, Alexander the Great. He omitted no occasion, we are told, of
showing his esteem and affection for her. When absent on his
campaigns, he kept up a constant correspondence with her, highly
valuing her letters, and in return concealing nothing from her. Saint
Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, a sublime example of this
friendship, sit on the shore of fame, side by side; the face of the
mother a little above that of the son; both of them worn with care,
full of lofty pathos and love, looking at us out of the night of
time; the sea of mortal passion far beneath their feet; the eternal
stars hanging silent above, even as Ary Scheffer reveals in his
solemn picture of them sitting in the window at Ostia, and gazing
together over the ocean.
Thirty years after the death of Monica, Augustine said in one of his
sermons, "Ah! The dead do not come back; for, had it been possible,
there is not a night when I should not have seen my mother, she who
could not live apart from me, and who, in all my wanderings, never
forsook me. For God forbid that in heaven her affection should cease,
or that she should not, if she could, have come to console me when I
suffered! She who loved me more than words can express." The example,
in American history, of a valued and fruitful friendship between a
mother and a son, given by Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams, is
stamped with prominence by the exceptional fact of the publication of
her letters to him. These letters breathe wisdom and virtue, with
incitement to all worthy aims, no less than strong mental
companionship and fervent maternal sympathy. They have been edited by
her grandson, who pays her a deserved tribute in the memoir he has
prefixed. The wife of the elder President Adams can never lose the
exalted place she holds, in the honoring remembrance of the American
people, among those exemplary women whose powerful talents and
virtues did so much to mould the destinies of the nascent Republic.
Madame Goethe said to Bettine, "My Wolfgang and I were so nearly of
an age, that we grew up together more as playmates than as mother and
child." And, when the great Wolfgang was an old man, he said that his
mother, as yet quite a child, grew up to consciousness first with,
then in, himself and his sister Cornelia. Her intercourse with him is
prominent through a large part of his life: her influence on him is
visible through the whole of it. The union of the illustrious
brothers Humboldt with their mother was especially full and tender.
While she lived, they shared souls; and, after her departure, the
sons idolized her memory. Long years had passed, when William,
expiring in the arms of his elder brother, said, "I shall soon be
with our mother." And Alexander said, "I did not think my old eyes
had so many tears." The relation of Guizot, the distinguished French
statesman and author, with his mother, was one of the deepest,
fullest, and noblest friendships that ever conjoined mother and son.
Madame Guizot went through the horror and tragedy of the Revolution,
to which her husband was one of the choicest victims, with a heroism
and a dignity unsurpassed; and devoted herself to her maternal duties
with a calm energy and wisdom whose proper fruits she lived long to
enjoy. Her character revealed the purest feminine qualities in
conspicuous perfection. Her honored old age showed all that is lovely
and all that is august united, in her history, her spirit, her
manners, her acquirements, and her presence, to attract confidence
and to command respect. Indissolubly joined, through more than sixty
years, with her brilliant and high-souled son, she was not more proud
and fond of him than he was of her.