THE MOTHER OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN *

BY IDA M. TARBELL

Abraham Lincoln, born in Kentucky, was descended from New England ancestry, from which he inherited an intense love of liberty, thoroughness of character and perfect integrity. As often happens, these qualities did not appear in his father, who was poor, improvident and ignorant. His mother was an energetic Christian woman of much refinement whose devotion to her domestic and maternal duties soon wore out her frail body, but imprinted her image indelibly on the heart of her son. Many times he said that all he was he owed to her. Then it must be assumed that to her

he owed his rugged honesty, which became part of his name, and that thoroughness which led him to commit much of the Bible to memory, and which lay at the foundation of his success.

Tradition has it that Mrs. Lincoln took great pains to teach her children what she knew, and that at her knee they heard all the Bible lore, fairy tales, and country legends that she had been able to gather in her poor life.

Lincoln's life had its tragedies as well as its touch of romance tragedies so real and profound that they gave dignity to all the crudeness and poverty which surrounded him, and quickened and intensified the mel

ancholy temperament which he inherited from his mother. Away back in 1816 when Thomas Lincoln had started to find a farm in Indiana, bidding his wife be ready to go into the wilderness on his return, Nancy Lincoln had taken her boy and her girl to a tiny grave, that of her youngest child: and the three had there said good-by to a little one whom the children had scarcely known, but for whom the mother's grief was so keen that the boy never forgot the scene.

Two years later he saw his father make a green pine box and put his dead mother into it, and he saw her buried not far from their cabin, without a prayer. Young as he was, it was his efforts, it is said, which brought a parson from Kentucky, three months later, to preach the sermon and conduct the service which seemed to the child a necessary honor to the dead. * From the Publications of the Lincoln History Society.

MOTHERS OF THE GREAT

BY GRACE GREENWOOD

I have been reading Lamartine. I have finished Raphael," and am almost through the "Memoires." Need I say that I am enchanted with both? The "Raphael" is a pure love-poem in the form of prose, indeed, but a poem in essence. Some think the story an exaggeration, if not an utter impossibility. I do not so esteem it. It is the ideal of a pure, unselfish love, with the depth and eternity of a great passion, without sensuality and without satiety. Its glow and strength and glory are not borrowed from poetry, but

are of its own nature, where it existed in all its intensity and infinity in the spirit of genius. Every true poet possesses a realm of perpetual summer, of more than tropical bloom and luxuriance, in its own beingan Italy of the soul; and this is only thrown open to us, truthfully revealed in Raphael.

But this work impresses the sensibilities and captivates the imagination - the "Memoires " come home to the heart. We there love, we enjoy, we feel intensely the artless ways, the innocent pleasures, the touching trials of childhood - we are carried back to that fresh, glowing season—we live in it again, with all its tenderness and truth, its laughter and tears, its harmony with nature, and its nearness to God.

It is curious to remark how Lamartine has made this entire work little more than a grand memorial, an immortalization, an apotheosis of his adored mother.

And to me it seems that it is this sentiment of filial piety, this first, purest, holiest flower of the heart, yet fresh with its morning dew, yet sweet with its early fragrance, yet unwithered by the noontide blaze of fame, and unblighted by the cares of the world or the frosts of time, which more than his genius or his patriotism, constitutes the peculiar beauty and glory of Lamartine's character.

To the benign influence of his mother, and to his having breathed such an atmosphere of tenderness in his childhood, we may ascribe not only the piety of this noble poet, but the strong infusion of the woman observable in his nature.

But it is of the high-souled, the heroic, the Christian

woman — one not wrapt in visions, and revelations, and ecstasies-walking on clouds and gazing longingly toward heaven - but one whose heaven is within and around her-looking from her eyes, breathing from her lips, eloquent in her life, and triumphant in her faith.

Again, I say, how beautiful is Lamartine's love for his mother! More beautiful even in its heart-warmth, its tender, impassioned worship than that deep love which prevailed with the stern Roman, against the hot sense of wrong, and “allayed his rages and revenges" when the noble Volumnia prayed.

How striking and complete is the contrast between Lamartine and Byron, and how much of this difference may have been owing to early domestic influences.

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy," the one might say; the other would have substituted quite another word for the "heaven." Byron, almost from the first, was shut out from the love and holiness of the divine life which is the native home of the spirit; but Lamartine was ever drawn toward it, bound to it as with golden chains, by the gentle piety and angelic tenderness of that pure, maternal heart. Her faith has been the anchor of his soul — her memory is as a shape of hope and peace, which ever sits smiling at the helm of his life-barque; but Byron floated forth alone, on a wild, unfriendly sea, with no “sweet spirit” to cheer and console, and no hand to save, when the storm came down, and the deep waters passed over him.

Byron's mother! — what arms were hers to receive the mortal incarnation of that beautiful and terrible

genius what a bosom was hers to pillow that head, molded like a Grecian god's, but destined to be crowned with a grander immortality- what a spirit to guide that passion-freighted heart, that will of iron, and that soul of fire! What wonder that the sunlight of love shone but faintly and at intervals on that troubled life. The morning was darkened, the hot noon soon overcast, and the night closed in early, with gloom and tempest.

REGINA COELI

BY COVENTRY PATMORE

Say, did his sisters wonder what could
Joseph see

In a mild, silent little Maid like thee?
And was it awful in that narrow house,
With God for Babe and Spouse?
Nay, like thy simple, female sort, each one
Apt to find Him in Husband and in Son,
Nothing to thee came strange in this.
Thy wonder was but wondrous bliss:
Wondrous, for, though

True Virgin lives not but does know,
(Howbeit none ever yet confess'd)
That God lies really in her breast,

Of thine He made His special nest!
And so

All mothers worship little feet,

And kiss the very ground they've trod;