They are the ones that will come to high places in our land, and that will possess the earth by right of the strongest.
Motherhood, to the woman who has lived only to be petted, and to be herself the centre of all things, is a virtual dethronement.

Something weaker, fairer, more delicate than herself comes,--something for her to serve and to care for more than herself.
It would sometimes seem as if motherhood were a lovely artifice of the great Father, to wean the heart from selfishness by a peaceful and gradual process.

The babe is self in another form.

It is so interwoven and identified with the mother's life, that she passes by almost insensible gradations from herself to it; and day by day the distinctive love of self wanes as the child-love waxes, filling the heart with a thousand new springs of tenderness.
But that this benignant transformation of nature may be perfected, it must be wrought out in Nature's own way.

Any artificial arrangement that takes the child away from the mother interrupts that wonderful system of contrivances whereby the mother's nature and being shade off into that of the child, and her heart enlarges to a new and heavenly power of loving.
When Lillie was sufficiently recovered to be fond of any thing, she found in her lovely baby only a new toy,--a source of pride and pleasure, and a charming occasion for the display of new devices of millinery.