happy
flight."

But the nursery ought not to be the mother's chrysalis. God never
intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If he had, he would
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
good. This world is not made for a tomb, but a garden. You are to be
a seed, not a death. Plant yourself, and you will sprout. Bury
yourself, and you can only decay. For a dead opportunity there is no
resurrection. The only enjoyment, the only use to be attained in this
world, must be attained on the wing. Each day brings its own
happiness, its own benefit; but it has none to spare. What escapes
today is escaped forever. Tomorrow has no overflow to atone for the
lost yesterdays.

Few things are more painful to look upon than the self-renunciation,
the self-abnegation of