Female affection

by Basil Montagu

MOTHER.

Of the love of a mother it is scarcely possible to give any adequate description. All that can be said of Charity, is most true if it be said of a mother’s love, which hopeth, believeth, endureth all things. As the spirit of God brooded over the creation, while it was yet in the womb of the morning,—with such heavenly love does the pure spirit of the mother, cherish her infant yet unborn. With silent and thankful tears, she hears the first sound of its little voice, and straightway forgets all her pain and travail! When she looks upon it, no matter how homely in the eyes of another, she thinks that the world contains nothing fairer. Who can number her prayers for her infant, or her fond anticipations of his future advancement?—she remembers that the greatest men have once been helpless children, and trusts that her little helpless child will one day be a great man; she treasures his first words in her heart, and in all his little sayings discovers seeds of wisdom and goodness; and if after all, she is doomed to find him deformed in limb, or weak in intellect, she dwells upon the sweetness of his disposition, and the strength of his affections, and clings to him with a warmer love, because others think him crippled and unsightly. If her child grows up, in the fear and nurture of God, and is deserving of her love, life has no joy like her joy; and should all her care prove fruitless, and the misguided youth make her heart sad, and steep her bread in tears, though all desert him she clings to him to the last: in poverty, in sickness, in the punishment of his crimes—she, is there: the fond mother in the loathsome convict-ship,—in the cell of the condemned,—at the foot of the scaffold! All, all, have deserted him,—save He who died for him, and she who gave him birth.

Such is the nature, such the constancy of a mother’s love. It begins before birth, and continues after death:

“There are spun

Around the heart such tender ties,

That our own children, to our eyes,

Are dearer than the sun.”

There are four forms in which this love is peculiarly conspicuous: when,

1st The child is criminal;

2nd The child is sick;

3rd The child is dying;

4th The child is dead.

This tenderness of a mother’s love when the child is criminal, is beautifully described by Hogarth, in his picture of “Industry and Idleness,” in that aged woman, who is clinging with the fondness of hope not quite extinguished, to her brutal vice-hardened son, whom she is accompanying to the ship, which is to bear him away from his native soil, of which he has been adjudged unworthy,—in whose shocking face every trace of the human countenance seems obliterated, and a brute beast to be left instead, shocking and repulsive to all but her who watched over it in its cradle before it was so sadly altered; and feels it must belong to her while a pulse, by the vindictive laws of his country, shall be suffered to beat in it.

There is a melancholy instance in the love of a mother for her child, in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers, for the year 1732, in the trial of John Waller. It is scarcely possible to conceive a more abandoned miscreant than Waller. He was at last detected and sentenced to the pillory; the mob seized him and beat him to death. His dead body was put into a coach and carried to Newgate. The prisoners refused to receive it; his mother who was in waiting, regardless of the infuriated mob, went into the coach, and placing his head in her lap, took away the dead body of her child.

At this very instant how many mothers are anxiously watching their sick children—unmindful of their own fatigue, or food, or rest!

In a storm in the Yarmouth Roads a vessel was wrecked, a young woman was seen clinging to a mast,—she was seen raising her child above the highest wave, in a wild and vain attempt to save it. On the next morning she was drifting to the shore,

“And like a common weed

The sea-swell took her hair.”

A fire destroyed a house, in which several lives were lost, among which a woman and her infant perished. On digging out the ruins, the mother was found burnt to death, but on her knees, holding her infant in a pail of water.

A few days since when walking to my chambers, I saw a hearse moving slowly before me. It stopped at the door of a respectable house; all the windows were closed. A coffin, covered with blue cloth, apparently of a child about fourteen was raised into the hearse. I happened to look up; I saw one of the shutters slightly opened, and a female looking anxiously. The hearse moved on. As the procession turned the corner of the street, I had the curiosity, not an idle curiosity, to look back; I saw the same female; she had partly opened the window.

“The King took the two sons of Rizpath, and the five sons of Michael whom she brought up, and he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the hill before the Lord, and they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days in the beginning of barley harvest.

“And Rizpath took sackcloth and spread it for herself upon the rock, from the beginning of harvest until water dropped upon them out of heaven,—and suffered neither the birds of the air to rest on them by day, nor the beasts of the field by night. Nor did she cease to watch them, until David, touched by this depth of affection, gave them burial with the bones of their forefathers.”

So too we see in every picture of the Crucifixion, the mother standing with patience and resignation at the foot of the cross:

“She when Apostles shrank could danger brave,

Last at his Cross, and earliest at his Grave.”