No! we do not, as a class, appreciate the dignity--I use the word advisedly--the _dignity_ and privilege of maternity! In this respect, our English sisters are far ahead of us. The Hebrew women, under the Theocracy, understood it better still, when Rachel pined in her quiet tent for the murmur of baby-voices and the touch of baby-fingers, and Hannah knelt in the court of the temple, to supplicate, with strong crying and tears, that the holy fountains of motherly love within her heart might flow out upon offspring of her own. In those days it was the childless wife, and not she who had borne many sons and daughters, who besought that her reproach might be taken away; that she might be accounted worthy to be intrusted with the high duty of rearing children to swell the ranks of the Lord’s chosen people. “If I felt as you do,” said a lady, sneeringly, to a friend of mine; “if I considered the gift of children a blessing, and the care of them a delightful task, I would not wait for the slow process by which Nature creates families, but adopt a dozen at a time from an asylum.” “They would not be mine!” was the quiet reply. I do not envy that mother her heart, who does not enter into the meaning of this rejoinder; who has not felt the delicious thrill of ownership in an object so lovely and precious as the helpless babe she has braved death itself to win; the awed delight of contemplating the new creation--living, intelligent, immortal--given to be _hers_! It may be--I have seen it somewhere asserted--that there is, after all, a species of sublimated selfishness in the ecstatic sweetness of the thought so well expressed by Emily Judson:-- “The pulse first caught its tiny stroke, The blood its crimson hue from _mine_! The life which _I_ have dared invoke Henceforth is parallel with THINE!” The candid reader who has known the depth and strength of a mother’s love, her patience, constancy, and self-sacrifice, will, I fancy, agree with me in pronouncing the selfishness to be _very_ “sublimated.”