My mother--my mother! see you into my heart, here by your
gravestone, to-night? Hast thou gone with me through my long
pilgrimage of time? If I have kept thy counsels, and walked by their
wisdom, hast thou approved, my mother? My mother, all that is good and
pure in me has come of thee! If the allurements of vice have tempted,
and frail nature has threatened to yield, the morning's admonition,
the evening's counsel in our long walks, would strengthen me to
forbearance. These bright memories have lived and remained with me a
guide and salvation; and now they are the morning's memory, the
evening's thought. As I have remembered and loved thee, I have been
guided and governed by these. Surely there can be no loss to the child
like the loss of the mother! How those are to be pitied! They go
through life without the holy influences for good coming from a
mother; they stumble on, and learn here and there, as time progresses,
the moral lessons only taught to childhood from a mother's lips: they
stumble and fall for the want of these; and, by experience, too often
bitter experience, learn in youth what in childhood should be taught,
which should grow up with them as a part of their being, to be the
guides and comforts of life.
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