“I could not ask mercy for my husband—he was innocent—but I implore it for my son, who is guilty.” This was the observation of the widow of Barnevelt to Maurice of Nassau, when interceding for her son, who in 1624 had engaged in a conspiracy to revenge his father’s death.
Filial Love.
Filial love; much more, the affection of a son to a mother, where love loses its awe, and veneration is mixed with tenderness! Filial love! the morality of instinct, the sacrament of nature and duty; or rather miscalled a duty, for it flows from the heart without effort, and is its delight, its indulgence, its enjoyment. It is guided, not by the slow dictates of reason; it awaits not encouragement from reflection or from thought; it asks no aid of memory; it is not innate, but active consciousness of having been the object of a thousand tender solicitudes, a thousand waking watchful cares, of meek anxiety and patient sacrifices, unremarked and unrequited by the object. It is a gratitude founded upon a conviction of obligations, not remembered because conferred before the tender reason could acknowledge, or the infant memory record them: a gratitude and affection which no circumstances should subdue, and which few can strengthen. A gratitude in which even injury from the object, though it may blunt regret, should never breed resentment—an affection, which can be increased only by the decay of those to whom we owe it; and which is then most fervent when the tremulous voice of age, resistless in its feebleness, inquires for the natural protection of its cold decline.”
“Aliens from nature! apostates from humanity! is there a crime more fell, more foul, is there any thing worse than a wilful persecutor of his mother? Guilty, by the general verdict of human kind!”
Lacretelle, the late member of the Academie Française, beautifully says—
“Je désire pour ami, le fils qui n’a jamais résisté aux larmes de sa mère.”
Politeness.
Politeness, that cementer of friendship and soother of enmities, is no where so much required and so frequently outraged as in family circles: in near and dear connections it is continually abandoned, and the result is, that all the illusions of life are destroyed, and with them, much of its happiness.