quick impulse of the mind, must spring to the lips of every man on such a
theme? Filial love! the morality of instinct, the sacrament of nature and
duty--or rather let me say it is miscalled a duty, for it flows from the
heart without effort, and is its delight, its indulgence, its enjoyment.
It is guided, not by the slow dictates of reason; it awaits not
encouragement from reflection or from thought; it asks no aid of memory;
it is an innate, but active, consciousness of having been the object of a
thousand tender solicitudes, a thousand waking watchful cares, of meek
anxiety and patient sacrifices unremarked and unrequited by the object.
It is a gratitude founded upon a conviction of obligations, not
remembered, but the more binding because not remembered,--because
conferred before the tender reason could acknowledge, or the infant
memory record them--a gratitude and affection, which no circumstances
should subdue, and which few can strengthen; a gratitude, in which even
injury from the object, though it may blend regret, should never breed
resentment; an affection which can be increased only by the decay of
those to whom we owe it, and which is then most fervent when the
tremulous voice of age, resistless in its feebleness, inquires for the
natural protector of its cold decline.

"If these are the general sentiments of man, what must be their
depravity, what must be their degeneracy, who can blot out and erase from
the bosom the virtue that is deepest rooted in the human heart, and
twined within the cords of life itself--aliens from nature, apostates
from humanity! And yet, if there is a crime more fell, more foul--if
there is any thing worse than a wilful persecutor of his mother--it is to
see a deliberate, reasoning instigator and abettor to the deed:--this it
is that shocks, disgusts, and appals the mind more than the other--to
view, not a wilful parricide, but a parricide by compulsion, a miserable
wretch, not actuated by the stubborn evils of his own worthless heart,