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[1377] feeling, though coupled, as they but rarely are, with a ready and and a willing mind for useful effort, graced by uninterupted benignity and sweetness, and not marred by the moody and irritable temperament which are not unfrequently the blemish of an imaginative mind. None of her sons can fail to be grateful for sentiment, from whichever parent derived, since it is not only the most satisfactory evidence of a divine and immortal germ within, but affords that purer gratification of thought and fancy, which, better than any thing in life, deserves the name of pleasure, being a satisfaction to which memory can ever revert without self-reproach. It is true that such a temperament is apt to be more sensitive to the thorns in life's pathway; but, when religiously developed, which is its best and most congenial bias, it furnishes itself a corrective for its fault, and opens to the soul fountains of even heavenly consolation. My mother's Cambridge years rather antedate my recollection; but in Groton her character and life are fresh in my memory. A picture of her is very prominent in my mind, as she stooped over her flower-bed, and toiled long sunny hours over its extensive border. Her unwearied labors in the heat attracted the admiration even of the hardy farmers. Her expression, as she knelt by the flower bed and bent her nearsighted gaze close to a plant, and, discovering some new unfolding promise of beauty, turned round to announce it with a child-like simplicity and a delighted smile, I think can never fade from the memories of her children. This image has often been renewed; and though latterly her hair, no less beautiful than before, has been gray, yet never thinned by years, her smile has gleamed ever with the same sunshiny, child-like triumph, her countenance never hardened or saddened by life's experience, nor her joy abated with the declining vigor of life. The flowers were ever new and ever young, and they kept her spirit still child-like in freshness of sentiment, simplicity of taste, and purity of soul, showing her ever
Boston, Phillips, Sampson, 1852.
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