"I need but pluck yon garden flower,
From where the wild weeds rise,
To wake with strange and sudden power,
A thousand sympathies!"

In this respect how irresistible is the influence of a mother's love and
kindness! Her very name awakens the torpid streams of life, gives a fresh
glow to the tablets of memory, and fills our hearts with a deep gush of
consecrated feeling.

Our habits, too, are formed under the moulding power of home. The "tender
twig" is there bent, the spirit shaped, principles implanted, and the whole
character is formed until it becomes a habit. Goodness or evil are there
"resolved into necessity." Who does not feel this influence of home upon
all his habits of life? The gray-haired father who wails in his second
infancy, feels the traces of his childhood-home in his spirit, desires and
habits. Ask the strong man in the prime of life, whether the most firm and
reliable principles of his character were not the inheritance of the
parental home. What an influence the teaching's and prayers of his mother
Monica had upon the whole character of the pious Augustine! The sterling
worth of Washington is a testimony to the formative power of parental
instruction. John Quincy Adams, even when his eloquence thundered through
our legislative halls, and caused a nation to startle from her slumber,
bent his aged form before God, and repeated the prayer of his childhood.
"How often in old age," says Bishop Hall, "have I valued those divine
passages of experimental divinity that I heard from the lips of a mother!"
Dr. Doddridge ever lived under the influence of those scripture
instructions his mother gave him from the Dutch tiles of her fireside. He
says, "these lessons were the instruments of my conversion." "Generally,"