Did you school yourself to absence all his adolescent years, That, though you be torn with parting, he should never see the tears? Now his ship has left the offing for the many-mouthed sea, This your guerdon, empty heart, by empty bed to bend the knee! And if he be but the latest thus to leave your dwindling board, Is a sorrow less for being added to a sorrow's hoard? Is the mother-pain the duller that to-day his brothers stand, Facing ambuscades of Congo, or alarms from Zululand? Toil, where blizzards drift the snow like smoke across the plains of death? Faint, where tropic fens at morning steam with feverladen breath? Die, that in some distant river's veins the English Mississippi, Yangtze, Ganges, Nile, Mackenzie, Amazon? Ah! you still must wait and suffer in a solitude untold While your sisters of the nations call you passive, call you cold Still must scan the news of sailings, breathless search the slow gazette, Shall the lonely hearthstone shame the legions who have died Grudging not the price their country pays for progress and for pride? Nay; but, England, do not ask us thus to emulate your scars Until women's tears are reckoned in the budgets of your wars. *From the fourth edition of the author's "Collected Poems, SaintGaudens; an Ode, and Other Poems." Copyright 1913 by Robert Underwood Johnson. New York and Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Co. QUOTATIONS Then spake the woman whose the living child was unto the king, for her bowels yearned upon her son, and she said, O my lord, give her the living child, and in no wise slay it. But the other said, Let it be neither mine nor thine, but divide it. Then the king answered and said, Give her the living child, and in no wise slay it: she is the mother thereof. I KINGS, iii, 26, 27. When Jesus therefore saw his mother, and the disciple standing by, whom he loved, he said unto his mother, Woman, behold thy son! Then saith he to the disciple, Behold thy mother! and from that hour that disciple took her unto his own home. ST. JOHN, xix, 26, 27. And it came to pass the day after, that he went into a city called Nain: and many of his disciples went with him, and much people. Now when he came nigh to the gate of the city, behold, there was a dead man carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow: and much people of the city was with her. And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her, and said unto her, Weep not. And he came and touched the bier: and they that bare him stood still. And he said, Young man, I say unto thee, Arise. And he that was dead sat up, and began to speak: and he delivered him to his mother. And there came a fear on all: and they glorified God. ST. LUKE, vii, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15. And when she could not longer hide him, she took for him an ark of bulrushes, and daubed it with slime and with pitch, and put the child therein; and she laid it in the flags by the river's brink. EXODUS, ii, 3. Many make the household but only one the home. JAMES RUSSELL Lowell. Youth fades, love droops, the leaves of friendship fall; A mother's secret hope outlives them all. They say that man is mighty, O'er lesser powers than he; N. P. WILLIS. But mightier power and stronger Man from his throne has hurled, Is the hand that rules the world. W. R. WALLACE. AS AT THY PORTALS ALSO DEATH BY WALT WHITMAN* As at thy portals also death, Entering thy sovereign, dim, illimitable grounds, To memories of my mother, to the divine blending, maternity, To her buried and gone, yet buried not, gone not from me, (I see again the calm benignant face fresh and beautiful still, I sit by the form in the coffin, I kiss and kiss convulsively again the sweet old lips, the cheeks, the closed eyes in the coffin;) To her, the ideal woman, practical, spiritual, of all of earth, life, love, to me the best, I grave a monumental line, before I go, amid these songs, And set a tombstone here. * By courtesy of the Walter Scott Company, Limited. OLD MOTHERS BY CHARLES S. Ross I love old mothers mothers with white hair, With murmured blessings over sleeping babes. Time with caressing touch, about them weaves While all the echoes of forgotten songs Seemed joined to lend a sweetness to their speech. Old mothers! as they pass with slow-timed step, MOTHERS AND MOTHERHOOD FROM Best Thoughts of Best Thinkers There is a Jewish saying that "God could not be everywhere and therefore he made mothers." While this saying may conflict with our ideas concerning omnipresence as a necessary attribute of Deity, it nevertheless voices an essential truth, that mothers, as the representatives of the fecundity of nature, sustain the closest relation to God as his chosen channel through which to manifest the highest forms of creative power. "The fatherhood of God, the motherhood of nature and the consequent brotherhood of man," is an expression giving motherhood |