Memoirs of Emma Courtney Part 23

I retired in a few months to my present residence, sharing my heart and my attentions between my children, who grew up under my fostering care, lovely and beloved.

'While every day, soft as it roll'd along, Shew'd some new charm.'

I observed your affection for each other with a flattering presage.

With the features of your father, you inherited his intrepidity, and manly virtues--even, at times, I thought I perceived the seeds of his inflexible spirit; but the caresses of my Emma, more fortunate than her mother--yet, with all her mother's sensibility--could, in an instant, soften you to tenderness, and melt you into infantine sweetness.

I endeavoured to form your young minds to every active virtue, to every generous sentiment.--You received, from the same masters, the same lessons, till you attained your twelfth year; and my Emma emulated, and sometimes outstripped your progress. I observed, with a mixture of hope and solicitude, her lively capacity--her enthusiastic affections; while I laboured to moderate and regulate them.

It now became necessary that your educations should take a somewhat different direction; I wished to fit you for a commercial line of life; but the ardor you discovered for science and literature occasioned me some perplexity, as I feared it might unfit you for application to trade, in the pursuit of which so many talents are swallowed up, and powers wasted. Yet, as to the professions my objections were still more serious.--The study of law, is the study of chicanery.--The church, the school of hypocrisy and usurpation! You could only enter the universities by a moral degradation, that must check the freedom, and contaminate the purity, of the mind, and, entangling it in an inexplicable maze of error and contradiction, _poison virtue at its source_, and lay the foundation for a duplicity of character and a perversion of reason, destructive of every manly principle of integrity. For the science of physic you expressed a disinclination. A neighbouring gentleman, a surveyor, a man high in his profession, and of liberal manners, to whose friends.h.i.+p I was indebted, offered to take you. You were delighted with this proposal, (to which I had no particular objection) as you had a taste for drawing and architecture.

Our separation, though you were to reside in the same town, cost us many tears--I loved you with more than a mother's fondness--and my Emma clung round the neck of her beloved brother, her Augustus, her playfellow, and sobbed on his bosom. It was with difficulty that you could disentangle yourself from our embraces. Every moment of leisure you flew to us--my Emma learned from you to draw plans, and to study the laws of proportion.

Every little exuberance in your disposition, which, generated by a n.o.ble pride, sometimes wore the features of asperity, was soothed into peace by her gentleness and affection: while she delighted to emulate your fort.i.tude, and to rise superior to the feebleness fostered in her s.e.x, under the specious name of delicacy. Your mutual attachment encreased with your years, I renewed my existence in my children, and antic.i.p.ated their more perfect union.

Ah! my son, need I proceed? Must I continually blot the page with the tale of sorrow? Can I tear open again, can I cause to bleed afresh, in your heart and my own, wounds scarcely closed? In her fourteenth year, in the spring of life, your Emma and mine, lovely and fragile blossom, was blighted by a killing frost--After a few days illness, she drooped, faded, languished, and died!

It was now that I felt--'That no agonies were like the agonies of a mother.' My broken spirits, from these repeated sorrows, sunk into habitual, hopeless, dejection. Prospects, that I had meditated with ineffable delight, were for ever veiled in darkness. Every earthly tie was broken, except that which bound you to my desolated heart with a still stronger cord of affection. You wept, in my arms, the loss of her whom you, yet, fondly believed your sister.--I cherished the illusion lest, by dissolving it, I should weaken your confidence in my maternal love, weaken that tenderness which was now my only consolation.

TO AUGUSTUS HARLEY.

My Augustus, _my more than son_, around whom my spirit, longing for dissolution, still continues to flutter! I have unfolded the errors of my past life--I have traced them to their source--I have laid bare my mind before you, that the experiments which have been made upon it may be beneficial to yours! It has been a painful, and a humiliating recital--the retrospection has been marked with anguish. As the enthusiasm--as the pa.s.sions of my youth--have pa.s.sed in review before me, long forgotten emotions have been revived in my lacerated heart--it has been again torn with _the pangs of contemned love_--the disappointment of rational plans of usefulness--the dissolution of the darling hopes of maternal pride and fondness. The frost of a premature age sheds its snows upon my temples, the ravages of a sickly mind shake my tottering frame. The morning dawns, the evening closes upon me, the seasons revolve, without hope; the sun s.h.i.+nes, the spring returns, but, to me, it is mockery.

And is this all of human life--this, that pa.s.ses like a tale that is told? Alas! it is a tragical tale! Friends.h.i.+p was the star, whose cheering influence I courted to beam upon my benighted course. The social affections were necessary to my existence, but they have been only inlets to sorrow--_yet, still, I bind them to my heart_!

Hitherto there seems to have been something strangely wrong in the const.i.tutions of society--a lurking poison that spreads its contagion far and wide--a canker at the root of private virtue and private happiness--a principle of deception, that sanctifies error--a Circean cup that lulls into a fatal intoxication. But men begin to think and reason; reformation dawns, though the advance is tardy.

Moral martyrdom may possibly be the fate of those who press forward, yet, their generous efforts will not be lost.--Posterity will plant the olive and the laurel, and consecrate their mingled branches to the memory of such, who, daring to trace, to their springs, errors the most h.o.a.ry, and prejudices the most venerated, emanc.i.p.ate the human mind from the trammels of superst.i.tion, and teach it, _that its true dignity and virtue, consist in being free_.

Ere I sink into the grave, let me behold the _son of my affections_, the living image of him, whose destiny involved mine, who gave an early, but a mortal blow, to all my worldly expectations--let me behold my Augustus, escaped from the tyranny of the pa.s.sions, restored to reason, to the vigor of his mind, to self controul, to the dignity of active, intrepid virtue!

The dawn of my life glowed with the promise of a fair and bright day; before its noon, thick clouds gathered; its mid-day was gloomy and tempestuous.--It remains with thee, my friend, to gild with a mild radiance the closing evening; before the scene shuts, and veils the prospect in impenetrable darkness.