Page:Letters to Mothers (1839).djvu/201

 so long the light of the world, deserted by poet and philosopher, fled, pale as her own sculpture, from the same brutal foe. Rome, thundered and fell. She struggled indeed, and was centuries in dying. But is she not dead? Can a mummy in the Vatican, from its gilded sarcophagus, be indeed that Rome, before whom the world trembled?

The story of these empires fills many pages. The little child reads them, and is wearied out when their ancient features shall have faded from the map of nations, and the tomes that recorded their triumphs and their fate, blacken in the last flame, where shall be the soul of that little child? Mother? where?

Will it not then, have but just begun its eternal duration? Will not its history, be studied by archangels? Proud Philosophy, perchance viewed it as a noteless thing, an atom. Doth God, the former of the body, the father of the spirit, thus regard it?

Mothers of the four millions of children, who are yet to be educated in this Western World, to whom our country looks, as her defence and glory, Mothers, of four millions of immortal beings have you any time to waste? any right to loiter on your great work?