BY EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY (1892-1950)

MY MOTHER'S BIBLE

BY GEORGE POPE MORRIS

THIS book is all that ’s left me now!
Tears will unbidden start,
With faltering lip and throbbing brow
I press it to my heart.
For many generations past,
Here is our family tree;
My mother’s hands this Bible clasped,
She, dying, gave it me.

Ah! well do I remember those
Whose names these records bear;
Who round the hearth-stone used to close
After the evening prayer,
And speak of what these pages said,
In tones my heart would thrill!
Though they are with the silent dead,
Here are they living still.

My father read this holy book
To brothers, sisters dear;
How calm was my poor mother’s look
Who leaned God’s word to hear!
Her angel face I see it yet!
What vivid memories come!
Again that little group is met
Within the halls of home!

Thou truest friend man ever knew,
Thy constancy I ’ve tried;
Where all were false I found thee true,
My counsellor and guide.
The mines of earth no treasures give
That could this volume buy:
In teaching me the way to live,
It taught me how to die.

MOTHERLESS

BY ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING

I WRITE. My mother was a Florentine,
Whose rare blue eyes were shut from seeing me
When scarcely I was four years old; my life,
A poor spark snatch’d up from a failing lamp
Which went out therefore. She was weak and frail;
She could not bear the joy of giving life
The mother’s rapture slew her. If her kiss
Had left a longer weight upon my lips,
It might have steadied the uneasy breath,
And reconcil’d and fraterniz’d my soul
With the new order. As it was, indeed,
I felt a mother-want about the world,
And still went seeking, like a bleating lamb
Left out at night, in shutting up the fold,
As restless as a nest-deserted bird
Grown chill through something being away, though what
It knows not. I, Aurora Leigh, was born
To make my father sadder, and myself
Not overjoyous, truly. Women know
The way to rear up children (to be just.)
They know a simple, merry, tender knack
Of tying sashes, fitting baby-shoes,
And stringing pretty words that make no sense,
And kissing full sense into empty words;
Which things are corals to cut life upon,
Although such trifles: children learn by such,
Love’s holy earnest in a pretty play,
And get not over-early solemniz’d,
But seeing, as in a rose-bush, Love’s Divine,
Which burns and hurts not, not a single bloom,
Become aware and unafraid of Love.
Such good do mothers. Fathers love as well
Mine did, I know,but still with heavier brains,
And wills more consciously responsible,
And not as wisely, since less foolishly;
So mothers have God’s license to be miss’d.

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