When revisiting the earth the ordinary life of the people had in it a great fascination. I wonder that the pleasures of memory and association are not more vividly realized in connection with the people we have known. The lessons are very salutary. With the hope of having my ideas more nearly approach my ideals I resolved increasingly to cultivate admiration. If called upon off-hand to cite one of the most striking impressions it would be that a pure, beautiful, intelligent, and well-bred woman "is the most attractive object of vision and contemplation in the world." I thought that nature had lavished her gifts about equally without and again within the human family. It is not a question of six of one and half a dozen of the other, but of half a dozen and a dozen. There is no answer to the question, What will God give us when he takes the sea? It is its only parallel. Without detracting from it there is also a world of beauty in an amazing river, always arriving, always departing; its banks wondrously deeply colored with green and gold. The mountains and the canyon and the waterfall have commanding attractions. These are without the human race, but for objects of study and enthusiasm and deference I turn to those made but little lower than the angels and crowned with glory and honor.
Let me add another recollection of the moment, that my eyes, my ears, my whole soul seemed sometimes to be just opening upon what appeared to me a new fact that such a mother of charming character, such as I used to see, was the day-star of that apotheosis of mother which reached its climax in the last year of the German war. A nation does not know what it has until it comes to exhibit it.
Retrospect is Cheering
The son of such a mother who became philanthropic looked benevolent. The commercialized look their part. Business men are in the saddle. Sons succeed sires as we pass into trade. The teachers and accountants and the scholars looked somewhat bookish. The boys had been making faces. Each man had made his. I never knew a man equally transfigured with one I saw. It is not guessing, it is not flattery, it is exact truth. It is not to be discussed under general rules. It is a real case with a particular history. It is a confirmed expression. It has atmosphere, almost a dim remote shade of halo. This is labeled on him for the townspeople to read. It fell to me thus to take a few short lessons in heredity. On returning to the homes of these people I remembered the pictures they had upon their walls that were all new and different to boyhood's eyes and seemed a real part of the make-up of the town. I now turn to the belief that they had their influence on the families. The religious portrayal of the child Samuel and so of others were silent evangelists and remained right there till they fixed an impression. I remember that mothers held their boys up to these pictures and encouraged them to talk to them, which they did, and now they report the conversation. Queenly mothers! Blessed among women shall they be!
"All my fears are laid aside,
If I but remember only
Such as these have lived and died!"
You may think that children cannot understand or don't care. They can understand and they do care. It is not a matter of the mind only but of the instinct. Mother's chair and father's Bible make a place for themselves in the family history. In one year, 1782, there were born in four families residing in three different states Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, Lewis Cass, and Martin Van Buren. The families were undistinguished as such from the multitude of others about them. Not so, however, with the sons, for just the reason that has now come under our observation.
The woman who stands in her humble doorway and waves her tearless adieu to her brave enlisted son is no less a hero than he. She remains to keep the home fires burning and suffers a thousand deaths through her affections and fears. She makes the larger sacrifice for she would give many lives for the boy who has but one to lose.
No Love Like Mother Love
A mother with a baby lying across her knees was asked, "Do you love it?" She looking up, her face radiant, with the light indescribable, said, taking a very deep breath, "I love it so that if Christ had not gone to Calvary to give my boy life eternal, if by so doing I could secure life eternal for him, I would go to hell that he might go to heaven."
A soldier, returning home, was telling a mother about her son found dying on the field after a battle. Said she, "I wish I had been there." "You were there all right," was the rejoinder, "you came first to the boy's mind. He had your name on his lips when he died." The mother has first place when the boy is in the stress of life. Ambulance men and nurses find her in sweet companionship when they reach the wounded boy. These were his passions, love of mother, home, and country. We had the evidences on the surface of the life that was lived within.