Mother, O mother, my heart calls for you,
Many a Summer the grass has grown green,
Blossomed and faded, our faces between;
Yet with strong yearning and passionate pain,
Long I to-night for your presence again.
--_Elizabeth Akers Allen._


A mother is a mother still,
The holiest thing alive.
--_Coleridge._


There is none,
In all this cold and hollow world, no fount
Of deep, strong, deathless love, save that within
A mother's heart.
--_Mrs. Hemans._


And all my mother came into mine eyes,
And gave me up to tears.
--_Shakespeare._


1. HER INFLUENCE.--It is true to nature, although it be expressed in
a figurative form, that a mother is both the morning and the evening
star of life. The light of her eye is always the first to rise, and
often the last to set upon man's day of trial. She wields a power more
decisive far than syllogisms in argument or courts of last appeal in