Like healing sent on wings of sleep,
Or dew to the unconscious flowers.
I can forget her melting prayer
While leaping pulses madly fly,
But in the still, unbroken air
Her gentle tone comes stealing by—
And years, and sin, and folly flee,
And leave me at my mother’s knee.”
There are two words in our language forever sacred to memory—Mother and Home! Home, the heaven upon earth, and mother its presiding angel. To us, children, here today, mother and home have realized all the longing, yearning aspirations of our souls, and now, in this blissful presence, we quaff to our mother this cup full and overflowing with the divine nectar of our love. I need not attempt to recite her deeds of devotion. There is not a page of our memory, not a table of our hearts, that is not adorned and beautified by acts of her loving care, in which her heart and her hands, her eyes and her soul, in holy alliance, ministered to our happiness.
There was never a time when there was not a song in her heart, sweeter than Æolian melody, wooing her children from folly to the blessedness, security, peace and contentment of home. Her children were her jewels in home’s shining circle, and if by the fiat of death a gem dropped away, the affectionate care it had received added soulful charm to her lullaby songs when at night she dismissed us and sent us to dreamland repose.