d nourish it
from her heart. Chivalry was perfectly aware that love was the most
powerful motive for education. That alone did more in the middle ages
to advance humanity than all the disputes of school-divinity have been
able to do to retard it.

We also have our school-divinity, the spirit of empty abstractions and
verbal disputes: we shall be able to combat its influence only by
prolonging that of the mother, associating her with education, and by
giving the child a well-beloved teacher. Love, they say, is a great
master. This is especially true of the greatest, the deepest, and the
purest of all affections.

How blind and imprudent we are! We take the child from its mother at a
time when it was most necessary to her. We deprive her of the dear
occupation for which God had formed her; and we are afterwards
surprised if this woman, cruelly separated, now languishing and idle,
give herself up to vain musings; suffer anew the yoke she formerly
bore; and, if, as is often the case, fancying herself to remain
faithful, she listen to the tempter, who speaks to her in the name of
God.

Be prudent, be wise; leave her her son. Woman must ever be loving.
Leave her rather the lover whom nature gives her; him whom she would
have preferred to all others, whilst you are occupied with your
business (with your passions perhaps). Leave on her arm the tall and
slender youth, and she will be proud and happy. You fear, lest, having
been kept too long by his mother, he may become effeminate. But, on
the contrary, if you left her her son, she would become masculine. Try
her, she will change, and you will be astonished yourself. Little
excursions on foot, and long ones on horseback--no trouble will be too
much for her. She begins bravely and heartily the exercises of the
young man; she makes herself of his own age, and is born again in this
_vita nuova_; even you on your return will think, when you see your
Rosalind, that you have two sons.

It is a general rule to which, at least, I have hardly ever seen any
exception, that superior men are all the _sons of their mother_. She
has stamped upon them, and they reproduce her moral as well as her
physical features.

I am about to surprise you. I will tell you that without her he will
never be a man. The mother alone is patient enough to develope the
young creature, by taking proper care of his liberty. We must be on
our guard, and take especial care not to place the chil