and dear; for wild and impetuous as they are when they first burst forth from the restraints of childhood, and rush on regardless of every impediment and wholesome check, as if to attain in the shortest space of time, the greatest possible distance from dependence and puerility, they are apt to meet with crosses and disappointments which plunge them suddenly back into the weakness they have been struggling to overcome, or rather to conceal; and it is then that a mother's love supplies the balm which their wounded feelings want, and provided they can mingle respect with their affection, they are not ashamed to acknowledge their dependence upon it still.

It may here be observed how much depends. upon the word respect. When the boy respects his mother, she is associated with his highest aspirations, and therefore he has pride as well as pleasure in her love. But he will not respect her merely because she has nursed him when an infant. No. He must find as he gains experience, a perfect accordance between the principles of virtue and the instruction he first heard from his mother's lips, as well as the rules by which her own conduct is regulated. It is this respect mingled with natural affection,

that constitutes the strongest and most durable bond which is woven in with the lifestrings of the heart; that draws back the wanderer to his home; and is the last, the very last, which the reprobate casts off.

In turning from the contemplation of a mother in the midst of her family, to that of a mere old woman, we make a melancholy descent from important usefulness to neglected imbecility. Perhaps we have been dwelling too much upon what ought to be, but the bare mention of an old woman brings us down at once to what is. To inquire why it should be thus, belongs more to the writer on morals than on poetry; yet so it is-that woman who has been cherished in her infancy and flattered in her youth, who has been exalted to the most honourable station which her sex can fill, and who has spent the meridian of her life in toils and anxieties for the good of others, becomes in old age, a mere proverb, and a bye-word-a warning to the young and the gay of what they must expect a similitude for all that is feeble and contemptible—an evidence of the destructive power of timea living emblem of decay.

It is true the mother is a mother still, and

greatly is it to be feared, that where she sinks into a state of total neglect, it is from the absence of all feeling of respect in the minds of her children; nor are there wanting instances to prove this fact-instances in which the want of youthful beauty has been more than supplied by the loveliness of a mind at peace with all the world, and with its God; where the weakness of old age has been dignified by the services of a well-spent life; and where the wants and wishes of second childhood have been soothed by affection, whose vital principle is gratitude, and whose foundation is esteem. But we speak of the world, and the things of the world as we find them, and we find old women so frequently neglected and despised, that it becomes a duty, as well as a pleasure, to show, that though bereft of every other charm, they may still be poeticalpoetical in their recollections, beyond what human nature can be in any other state or stage of its existence.

It is an unkind propensity that many writers have, to make old women poetical through the instrumentality of their passions, exaggerating them into witches and monsters of the most repulsive description, and that not so much

"to point a moral," as "to adorn a tale;" but in such instances the writer is indebted to their recollections for all the interest which his unnatural exhibitions excite-to flashes of former tenderness shooting through the gloom of despair-to bright and glowing associations following in the wake of madness-and to once familiar images of love and beauty, reanimated by a strange paradox, at the touch of the wand of death, and bending in all their early loveliness over the brink of the grave.

Infinite indeed beyond the possibility of calculation, must be the recollections and associations of her, whose long life from its earliest to its latest period, has been a life of feelingwhose experience has been that of impressions, rather than events-and whose sun goes down amidst the varied and innumerable tints which these impressions have given to its atmosphere. Endued with an inexhaustible power of multiplying relative ideas, how melancholy must be the situation of her who was once beloved and cherished, now despised and forsaken-who in her turn loved and cherished others, and is now neglected. If she be a mother-one of those fond mothers who expect that mere indulgence is to win the lasting re

gard of their children, what sad thoughts must crowd upon her at every fresh instance of unkindness, and every additional proof that she has fallen away from what she was, both in her own and others' estimation. Over the brow that now frowns upon her, she perhaps has watched with unutterable tenderness through the long night when every eye but her's was sleeping. The lips that now speak to her coldly, or answer her with silence when she speaks, she has bathed with the welcome draught when they were parched and burning with contagious fever. The scorn with which her humble pretensions are looked down upon, arises in the hearts of those for whose higher intellectual attainments she has made every sacrifice, and exerted every faculty. And what if she be unlearned in the literature of modern times, she understands deeply and feelingly the springs of affection, and tenderness, and sorrow. She knows from what source flow the bitterest tears, and

"How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is
"To have a thankless child."

She sees the young glad creatures of another generation sporting around her, and her thoughts