PARENTS.
Children, obey your parents in all things: for this is well pleasing unto the Lord.—Colossians, iii. 20.
Honour thy parents to prolong thine end;
With them, though for a truth, do not contend;
Whoever makes his father’s heart to bleed,
Shall have a son that will avenge the deed.
Thomas Randolph.
Not those alone are parents, to whose cares
The opening buds of human life are given;
Truth, Beauty, Love, have each unnumbered heirs,
And Earth itself is but the child of Heaven.
Nature repeats herself; and human thought
Mirrored in deeds, becomes more truly real:
Thus only on the web of life are wrought
The glowing pictures of the world ideal.
The labourer who embowers his cottage round
With tasteful gifts—his honest hand the donor,
Makes of that little spot of cultured ground,
A pleasing transcript of its joyful owner.
The matron, toiling with unselfish aim
To bless her little band of cherished creatures,
But mounts the picture, from whose shining frame
For ever beam her dear, benignant features.
Thought is the favoured child of thoughtful ones,
As heaven is mirrored in the quiet waters;
The statesman’s high achievements are his sons,
And the sweet poet’s lays his tuneful daughters.
The sculptor, bending o’er his marble child,
Models himself in fixed, enduring beauty;
The painter’s soul hath from the canvass smiled,
Breathing deep tones of passion or of duty.
None shall die childless; and the frailest one
Of all the living crowds around us pressing,
May, like the Eternal Father, give his son
To be humanity’s perpetual blessing.
Mrs. F. H. Cooke.