Home Is Yet Wherever She Is

In speaking to an occasion a century or so ago, Rufus Choate left some lines on love of country that seem to have as much of meaning for love of home: “There is a love,” he said, “which comes uncalled for, one knows not how. It comes with the very air, the eye, the ear, the instincts, …the first beatings of the heart. The faces of brothers and sisters and the loved father and mother, the laugh of playmates, the old willow tree and well and schoolhouse, the bees at work in the spring, the note of the robin at evening, the lullaby, …the visits of neighbors, …all things which make childhood happy begin it; …as… love and the sense of home…come to life.”
These are lines of much meaning. Thoughts of mothers somehow seem to symbolize the sense of belonging: of home and family, of the love of loved ones, the lasting, healing kind of love which Emerson said is “…the remedy for all blunders, the cure of blindness, …the redeemer and instructor of souls, …is love.”
The “power to heal, to redeem, to guide and to guard…Will you not covet such power as this,” wrote John Ruskin, “and seek such a throne as this, …The perfect loveliness of a woman’s countenance can only consist in that majestic peace, which is founded in the memory of happy and useful years, …Queens you must always be; …queens to your husbands and your sons; …wherever a true wife comes, …this home is always round her.”—with a love that heals, that waits and watches, a love that gives, and does, and shares, and shelters—and understands. “The stars only may be over her head; …but home is yet wherever she is.”
Thank God for mothers, you who have them. And you who have not now, thank Him for such a mother to remember. And you, the young mothers who have children yet around you, God grant that you may give them such love, such memories to remember.