Page:The Mothers of England.djvu/10



attempt a description of the feelings of a mother on that important event which ushered into the world an immortal being, destined to be her peculiar charge, in its preparation both for this world and the next, would be to lift the natural veil, beyond which are shrouded those inner workings of the elements of happiness and misery, with which it may be truly said, that a stranger intermeddleth not. Still there are—there must be—thoughts common to all mothers who reflect seriously; and it is with these, chiefly, that the writer on maternal influence has to do.

It is no disparagement to that strongest of all principles in the female sex—a mother's love—to call it a mere instinct; for such it must be, when shared in common with the animal creation. Yet surely an instinct of such power as this can not be acted upon by a rational and responsible being, without anxious inquiry as to the direct nature of that responsibility; and why, in the ordinations of Divine Providence, an instinct so powerful should have been implanted in the mother's breast.

A mother's love, then, could never have been intended merely to be trifled with in the nursery, or expended in infantine indulgence. That which is strong enough to overcome the universal impulse of self-preservation—that which brings the timid bird to stoop her wing to the destroyer, in order to lure him from her nestlings—that which softens into tenderness the nature of the eagle and the lion—that which has power to render the feeblest and most delicate