and become the disciple of a higher school. She is led to be disinterested, she is induced to resign the restless search of pleasure, to feel her own insufficiency, to sit down under the shadow and shelter of Almighty wisdom. Are not these blessed results?
But, young mother, what do you hold in your arms? A machine of exquisite symmetry; the blue veins revealing the mysterious life-tide through an almost transparent surface; the waking thought speaking through the sparkling eye, or dissolving there in tears; such a form as the art of man has never equalled; and such a union of matter with mind, as his highest reason fails to comprehend. You embrace a being, whose developements may yet astonish you; who may perhaps sway the destiny of others; whose gatherings of knowledge you can neither foresee or limit; and whose chequered lot of sorrow or of joy, are known only to the Omnipotence which fashioned him. Still, if this were all, the office of a mother would lose its crowning dignity. But to be the guide of a spirit which can never die, to make the first indelible impressions on what may be a companion of seraphs, and live with an unbounded capacity for bliss or woe, when these poor skies under which it was born, shall have vanished like a vision, this is the fearful honour which God hath entrusted to the "weaker vessel," and which would make us
