John Quincy Adams’s mother lived to be seventy-four; but he had not outgrown his sense of personal dependence upon her, when she was taken away. “My mother was an angel upon earth,” he wrote. “She was the real personification of female virtue, of piety, of charity, of ever-active and never-intermitting benevolence. O God! could she have been spared yet a little longer!” “I have enjoyed but for short seasons, and at long, distant intervals, the happiness of her society, yet she has been to me more than a mother. She has been a spirit from above watching over me for good, and contributing, by my mere consciousness of her existence, to the comfort of my life. That consciousness has gone, and without her the world feels to me like a solitude.” When President Nott, of Union College, was more than ninety years old, and had been for half a century a college president, as strength and sense failed him in his dying hours, the memory of his mother’s love was fresh and potent, and he could be hushed to needed sleep by patting him gently on the shoulder, and singing to him the familiar lullabies of long ago, after the fashion of that mother, who he fancied was still at hand to care for him.
Lord Macaulay has been called a cold-hearted man, but he was never unmindful of the unique preciousness of a mother’s love. He it was who said: “In after life you may have friends, fond, dear, kind friends, but never will you have again the inexpressible love and gentleness lavished upon you which a mother bestows. Often do I sigh, in my struggles with the hard, uncaring world, for the sweet deep security I felt when, of an evening, nestling in her bosom, I listened to some quiet tale, suitable to my age, read in her untiring voice. Never can I forget her sweet glances cast upon me when I appeared asleep; never, her kiss of peace at night. Years have passed since we laid her beside my father in the old churchyard, yet still her voice whispers from the grave and her eye watches over me as I visit spots long since hallowed to the memory of my mother.”
Napoleon Bonaparte, with all his self-reliance and personal independence of character, never ceased to look up to his mother with a reverent affection, and he was accustomed to say that he owed all that he was, and all that he had, to her character and loving ministry. “Ah, what a woman! where shall we look for her equal?” he said of her. “She watched over us with a solicitude unexampled. Every low sentiment, every ungenerous affection, was discouraged and discarded. She suffered nothing but that which was grand and elevated to take root in our youthful understandings.... Losses, privations, fatigue, had no effect on her. She endured all, braved all. She had the energy of a man combined with the gentleness and delicacy of a woman.”
When all else seemed lost to him, as he lay a lonely prisoner on the shores of St. Helena, Napoleon was sure of one thing. “My mother loves me,” he said; and the thought of his mother’s love was a comfort to him then. He who had felt able to rule a world unaided, was not above a sense of grateful dependence on a love like that. “My opinion is,” he said, “that the future good or bad conduct of a child depends entirely upon its mother.”
A young army officer lay dying, at the close of our American civil war. He had been much away from home even before the war; and now for four years he had been a soldier in active army service. On many a field of battle he had faced death fearlessly, and in many an hour of privation and hardship he had been dependent on his own strength and resources. What could more have tended to wean a man from reliance on a mother’s presence and sustaining care? The soldier’s mind was wandering now. It was in the early morning, after a wakeful, restless night. Exciting scenes were evidently before his mind’s eye. The enemy was pressing him sorely. He was anxious as to his position. He gave orders rapidly and with vehemence. His subordinates seemed to be failing him. Everything was apparently wrong. Just then the young officer’s mother, who had come from the North to watch over him, entered the room where he lay. As the door opened for her coming, he turned toward it his troubled face, as if expecting a new enemy to confront him. Instantly, as he saw who was there, his countenance changed, the look of anxiety passed away, the eye softened, the struggle of doubt and fear was at an end, and with a deep-drawn sigh of relief he said in a tone of restful confidence, “Ah, mother’s come! It’s all right now!” And the troubled veteran soldier was a soothed child again.
Soldier, statesman, scholar, divine; every man is a child to his mother, to the last; and it is the best that is in a man that keeps him always in this child-likeness toward his loving mother. Were it not for the power of a mother’s love, that best and truest side of a man’s nature would never be developed, for the man’s good and for the mother’s reward. It costs something to be a good mother; but there is no reward which earth can give to be compared with that love which a faithful mother wins and holds from the son of her love. Oh! if good mothers could only know how much they are doing for their children by their patient, long-suffering, gentle ways with them, and how sure these children are to see and feel this by and by, the saddest of them would be less sad and more hopeful, while toiling and enduring so faithfully, with perhaps apparently so slight a return.
XXVIII.
ALLOWING PLAY TO A CHILD’S IMAGINATION.
Imagination is a larger factor in the thoughts and feelings of a child than in the thoughts and feelings of an adult; and this truth needs to be recognized in all wise efforts at a child’s training. The mind of a child is full of images which the child knows to be unreal, but which are none the less vivid and impressive for being unreal. It is often right, therefore, to allow play to a child’s imagination, when it would not be right to permit the child to say, or to say to the child, that which is false.