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About The Battalion. (College Station, Tex.) 1893-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 15, 1894)
* 8 THE BATTALION. sorrow, sings our sweet lullaby to rest, and cradles us on its warm and throb bing breast, and when pain and sickness prey upon the fragile form, what medi- eine is there like a mother’s kiss? What healing power like a mother’s bosom? And when launched upon the wide ocean of a tempestuous world, wha'; eye gazes on our adventurous voyage with half the eagerness as does maternal fondness, amid the sad yet not unpleas ing contest of hopes and fears and deep anxieties ? When the rugged path of life has been bravely, patiently and nobly trod den, when posterity has smiled upon us, when virtue has upheld us among world’s temptations, and when fame has bound her laurels around us, is there a heart that throbs with more lively or greater pleasure. Yet it is not prosperity, with her smiles and beauty, that tries the purity and fervor of a mother’s love. It is the dark and dreary precients of adversity, and the cold frowns of an unfeeling world, in poverty and despair, in sickness and sorrow, that it shines with a bright ness beyond mortality, and stifling the Secret agonies of her own heart, strives to pour balm and consolation on the wounded sufferer. Absence cannot chill a mother’s love, nor can vice itself destroy a mother’s kindness. The lowest degradation of hu man frailty cannot wholly destroy the remembrance of the first, fond yearnings of your affection. The love of a father may be as deep and as sincere, but is calmer and more calculating, and more fully direct in the great periods and ends of life. It can not descend into those roinatiae of per fection, those watchful cares for the mi nor comforts and gratifications of exist ence which a mother, from her finer sensibilities of nature, Can more readily appreciate. The pages of history abound with the- record of maternal love in every age and clime, and every rank of life; but it is a. lesson of never ending presence, which the heart can feel and acknowledge, and needs not example to teach how to ven erate. Can there be a thing so vile and odious,, so dead to nature’s impulses, who, in re turn for constant care, such unvarying kinddess, can willingly or heedlessly wound the heart that cherished him, for sake the lonely one who nursed and sheltered him; who can madly sever the- sweetest bond of union and bring down the gray hairs of his parents to the grave; who can leave them in their old age, to solitude and poverty, while he wantons in the pride of undeserved pros perity ! If there be any, let him revoke the- name of man, and herd with the beasts and perish, or let him feel to destruction the worst of human miseries. Junior. • —t-- Except a living man there is nothing more wonderful than a book ! — a mes sage to us from the dead, from human souls whom we never saw, who lived, perhaps, thousands of miles away; .and yet these, in those little sheets of paper, speak to us, amuse us, terrify us, teach us, comfort us, open their hearts to us as brothers. —Kingsley. Words learned by note a parrot may rehearse, But talking is not always to converse. —Cowper.