tanding her somewhat meddlesome and despotic temper, Queen
Olympias seems to have maintained an intimate friendship with her
son, Alexander the Great. He omitted no occasion, we are told, of
showing his esteem and affection for her. When absent on his
campaigns, he kept up a constant correspondence with her, highly
valuing her letters, and in return concealing nothing from her. Saint
Augustine and his mother, Saint Monica, a sublime example of this
friendship, sit on the shore of fame, side by side; the face of the
mother a little above that of the son; both of them worn with care,
full of lofty pathos and love, looking at us out of the night of
time; the sea of mortal passion far beneath their feet; the eternal
stars hanging silent above, even as Ary Scheffer reveals in his
solemn picture of them sitting in the window at Ostia, and gazing
together over the ocean.

Thirty years after the death of Monica, Augustine said in one of his
sermons, "Ah! The dead do not come back; for, had it been possible,
there is not a night when I should not have seen my mother, she who
could not live apart from me, and who, in all my wanderings, never
forsook me. For God forbid that in heaven her affection should cease,
or that she should not, if she could, have come to console me when I
suffered! She who loved me more than words can express." The example,
in American history, of a valued and fruitful friendship between a
mother and a son, given by Abigail Adams and John Quincy Adams, is
stamped with prominence by the exceptional fact of the publication of
her letters to him. These letters breathe wisdom and virtue, with
incitement to all worthy aims, no less than strong mental
companionship and fervent maternal sympathy. They have been edited by
her grandson, who pays her a deserved tribute in the memoir he has
prefixed. The wife of the elder President Adams can never lose the
exalted place she holds, in the honoring remembrance of the American
people, among those exemplary women whose powerful talents and
virtues did so much to mould the destinies of the nascent Republic.
Madame Goethe said to Bettine, "My Wolfgang and I were so nearly of
an age, that we grew up together more as playmates than as mother and
child." And, when the great Wolfgang was an old man, he said that his
mother, as yet quite a child, grew up to consciousness first with,
then in, himself and his sister Cornelia. Her intercourse with him is
prominent through a large