"Chased and wearied out by the cares of manhood, we enter the temple dedicated to youth-('a guardian standing near us,'); and our persecutors [the Furies of Æschylus] sleep while we linger at the altar." Young Cadurcis, in Venetia, newly motherless, is told by Lady Annabel that she is his mother now, and that he shall find her one if he will. He tries to stifle a sob. "Ah, Lady Annabel, you are my friend now, and so are glow in love, which hereafter he may press in anguish and kiss till his own are cold. 66 'Oh, revere her raven hair! Pray for her at eve and morn, That Heaven may long the stroke defer,- Pray for her at eve and morn!" Sydney Dobell's Roman minstrel has a fancy about a rose, sung on the morn he saw his mother's first grey hair. The overblown rose is the theme of his minor key minstrelsy. "O maiden! touch gently the rose overblown, And think of the mother thy childhood hath known; Lest her pallor grow paler that thou lovest them. From their beauties, O maid, each bright butterfly chase, As thou countest the lines on thy mother's dim cheek; Keep sweet attendance on sweeter decay." As auld Elspeth puts it, in Scott's Antiquary, "Ye ken how the rhyme says "He turned him right and round again, Said, Scorn na at my mither; Light loves I may get mony a ane, But minnie ne'er anither." Or as the old negro, in the best read of all stories of negro life: "Tell ye what, Mas'r George, the Lord gives good many things twice over; but He don't give ye a mother but once. Ye 'll never see sich another woman, Mas'r George, if ye live to be a hundred years old." you all; and you know I love you very much. But you were not my friends two years ago; and things will change again. A mother is your friend as long as she lives; she cannot help being your friend." Here were true friends, if such could exist; here were fine sympathies, pure affections, innocent and disinterested hearts. Every domestic tie, says the author, yet remained perfect, except the spell-bound tie of blood. That wanting, all was a bright and happy vision that might vanish in an instant, and for ever; that perfect, even the least graceful, the most repulsive home, had its irresistible charms; and its loss, when once experienced, might be mourned for ever, and could never be restored. "This rugged world affords at last no rest What a sad commonplace in autobiography, including the autobiography of fiction rooted in fact, is the too late appreciation of this mother's love. How true it is, exclaims Theodore Hook for instance, in the most veritably autobiographical of all his fictions, that when those we have adored are gone-when those lips we have loved are sealed in silence, and can no longer speak a pardon for our indiscretions or omissions—we reproach ourselves with inattentions and unkindnesses, which, at the time we then fancied them committed, would perhaps have been matters of indifference or even jest. Mrs. Brunton's Laura, in SelfControl, looks back to the churchyard where her mother sleeps, and tears fill her eyes, as, passing over long intervals of unkindness, she recollects some casual proof of maternal love; and they fall fast as she remembers that for that love she can now make no return. Henry Esmond, musing on a mother's goodness—her devising of silent bounties, her scheming of gentle kindnesses -too truly says that we take such goodness, for the most part, as if it was our due; some of us never feeling this devotion at all, nor being moved by it to gratitude or acknowledgment; others only recalling it years after,1 when the days are past in 1 There is a passage in Mrs. Norton's poem, The Dream, which has been which those sweet kindnesses were spent on us; and we offer back our return for the debt by a poor tardy payment of tears. "Then forgotten tones of love recur to us, and kind glances shine out of the past—oh, so bright and clear!-oh, so longed after! because they are out of reach; as holiday music from withinside a prison wall, or sunshine seen through the bars; more prized, because unattainable; more bright, because of the contrast of present darkness and solitude whence there is no escape." De profundis comes that articulate suspirium of Hartley Coleridge in the sonnet addressed to his dead mother: "Oh, would that I could see thee in thy heaven For one brief hour, and know I was forgiven For all the pain and doubt and rankling shame Which I have caused to make thee weep or sigh. Bootless the wish! for where thou art on high, Sin casts no shadow, sorrow hath no name." If never before, often and often in the lives and the deaths of the sons of men it comes to pass that, dying, they become absorbed in memory of a mother. She may have been dead long years since, or she may yet be living while they are going down to the gates of the grave, far from her possible presence to smoothe the descent for them; but either way, often and often their last thoughts are fixed upon her. When Conradin knelt, with uplifted hands, awaiting the blow of the executioner, while even the followers of the inexorable Charles of Anjou could scarcely restrain their pity and indignation, he uttered these last words: "O my mother! how deep admired for a tender Crabbism in it that goes right to the heart: it is a recollection of her widowed mother, alone amid her brood of careless hearts: 66 Striving to guide, to teach, or to restrain The young rebellious spirits crowding round, Who saw not, knew not, felt not for thy pain, With riper judgment looking to the past, Stamps with remorse each wasted hour of time, And darkens every folly into crime!" will be thy sorrow at the news of this day!" It is noteworthy as a fact in the natural history of the dying, that the last words of the men tended by English sisters of mercy in the Crimean war were most often of their mothers, even when they had wives and children; a fact traced by philosophy to the force of early association which, in supreme moments of physical weakness, so uniformly asserts itself. In one of Mrs. Browning's Italian war poems, a court lady-and that is the title of the poem-passes through the hospital wards, and soothes the sufferers: "Down she stepped to a pallet where lay a face like a girl's, Young, and pathetic with dying,—a deep black hole in the curls, As Sir John Moore lay a-dying, after Corunna, once only his voice faltered, as he spoke of his mother. Burckhardt's last words were about his mother, when he became strongly affected. Hazlitt's dying thoughts reverted wistfully to the old mother in Devonshire he so longed to see again. The whole world is akin as regards these touches of nature. East and west join hands. The Greek classics and the Arabian Nights are at one. The prince in Scheherazade's story of Aboulhassan declares all his regret, in dying, to be that he cannot die in the arms of his dearest mother, "who," he says, "has always loved me with a tenderness not to be expressed." And the moribund Ajax of Sophocles melts somewhat as he anticipates the grief his violent end will cause her that bare him: Η που τάλαινα τήνδ' ὅταν κλύῃ φάτιν, THE RIGHT DOING OF THE SUPREME JUDGE. GENESIS Xviii. 25. G REAT truths are not unfrequently asserted on the strength. of texts of Scripture which really have another bearing altogether. The texts become inseparably allied with the truths in traditional usage, although the relationship is, after all, an artificial and made up one. Abraham's expostulating query, "Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?" is commonly cited by way of rebuking the repining of the bereaved. It is right, and may be necessary, to rebuke the repining of the bereaved: but scarcely so by means of this particular text. Abraham's words constitute in effect a remonstrance, as of one who had taken upon him to speak unto the Lord, and who appealed to infinite justice to be just and true,-appealed to the Judge of all the earth to deal as became Him with the cause in hand, to vindicate His way to men, to fulfil righteousness, to do right. The father of the faithful appealed to the Father of the spirits of all flesh, "For Thou hast made them, Thou art just," to discriminate between godly and ungodly in His judgments then impending. Surely the Lord would not slay the righteous in common with the wicked; because He, as Judge universal, and beyond appeal, must needs do right. The author of Mechanism in Thought and Morals has said, that if a created being has no rights which his Creator is bound to respect, there is an end to all moral relations between them. "Good father Abraham thought he had, and did not hesitate to give his opinion. Far be it from Thee,' he says, to do so and so. And Pascal, whose reverence amounted to theophobia,1 could treat of the duties of the Supreme to the dependent 1 A term used by Dr. Holmes to designate a state of mind thus described by Jeremy Taylor: "There are some persons so miserable and scrupulous, such perpetual tormentors of themselves with unnecessary fears, that their meat and drink is a snare to their consciences. These persons do not believe noble things of God." |