gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,--freshness, and vivacity, and
sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous, gone,
gone, gone forever. This our Tract-Society book puts very prettily. "She
wraps herself in the robes of infantile simplicity, and, burying
her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood, patiently awaits the
sure-coming resurrection in the form of a noble, high-minded,
world-stirring son, or a virtuous, lovely daughter. The nursery is the
mother's chrysalis. Let her abide for a little season, and she shall
emerge triumphantly, with ethereal wings and a happy flight."

But the nursery has no business to be the mother's chrysalis. God never
intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If He had, He would have
made her a caterpillar. She has no right to bury her womanly nature in
the tomb of childhood. It will surely be required at her hands. It was
given her to sun itself in the broad, bright day, to root itself fast
and firm in the earth, to spread itself wide to the sky, that her
children in their infancy and youth and maturity, that her husband in
his strength and his weakness, that her kinsfolk and neighbors and the
poor of the land, the halt and the blind and all Christ's little ones,
may sit under its shadow with great delight. No woman has a right to
sacrifice her own soul to problematical, high-minded, world-stirring
sons, and virtuous, lovely daughters. To be the mother of such, one
might perhaps pour out one's life in draughts so copious that the
fountain should run dry; but world-stirring people are extremely rare.
One in a century is a liberal allowance. The overwhelming probabilities
are, that her sons will be lawyers and shoemakers and farmers and
commission-merchants, her daughters nice, "smart," pretty girls,
all good, honest, kind-hearted, commonplace people, not at all
world-stirring, not at all the people one would glory to merge one's
self in. If the mother is not satisfied with this, if she wants them
otherwise, she must be otherwise. The surest way to have high-minded
children is to be high-minded yourself. A man cannot burrow in his
counting-room for ten or twenty of the best years of his life, and come
out as much of a man and as little of a mole as he went in. But the
twenty years should have ministered to his manhood, instead of trampling
on it. Still less can a woman bury herself in her nursery, and come out
without harm. But the years should have done her great go