Page:The Mothers of England.djvu/63

58 elements of character, by inspiring a love of the one, and a hatred of the other! "By what means could the mother work upon the mind of her child, so as to impart these ideas, except by that close sympathy which exists between them, by the confidence she has inspired, and the love upon which it implicitly depends? It is simply by the use of these means, that she is able to direct the love of her child to anything which she herself regards as lovely, and to render odious in its eyes whatever she despises or dislikes. Here then is power—the greatest which one human being can possibly exercise over another—the power to rule its admiration and its disgust, its love and its abhorrence.

It is true, the mother will often have to oppose the appetites and inclinations of childhood, but it is in her own peculiar capability for doing this, and doing it effectually, that we see the superiority of her qualifications to those of all others; for no sooner is the child assured of her sympathy, than it trusts all its wishes to her tenderness to forgive, or to her bounty to supply; no sooner is it convinced of her wisdom, than it evinces a willingness to submit, on the ground of her knowing best what is for its good; and no sooner does it feel that her love is entirely disinterested, and wholly free from caprice or change, than it yields, under the satisfactory conviction, that its present sacrifice will be more than made up to it in some better way.

With these unquestionable advantages, then, the mother begins to question which of the elements of character displayed by her child, she can turn to good account. That perpetual restlessness for which the poor little busybody has been so often chidden—let us not dismiss that as a crime, without some examination as to what can be made of it. The idea that children must squander about, and that servants must gather up, prevails almost universally in all families. Thus, when the little lord of the nursery has thrown everything he had to play with in all possible directions, when he has pulled the chairs out of their proper places, upset the stools, and dragged the floorcloth into heaps, he grows fretful and dissatisfied until his nurse supplies him with some other kind of amusement, or probably until she replaces the furniture, in order that he may have the pleasure of throwing all things into confusion again.