Still, the great novelty, the immense gain, to me, is my relation with
my child. I thought the mother's heart lived in me before, but it did
not;--I knew nothing about it. Yet, before his birth, I dreaded it.
I thought I should not survive: but if I did, and my child did, was I
not cruel to bring another into this terrible world? I could not, at
that time, get any other view. When he was born, that deep melancholy
changed at once into rapture: but it did not last long. Then came the
prudential motherhood. I grew a coward, a care-taker, not only for the
morrow, but, impiously faithless, for twenty or thirty years ahead.
It seemed very wicked to have brought the little tender thing into
the midst of cares and perplexities we had not feared in the least
for ourselves. I imagined everything;--he was to be in danger of
every enormity the Croats were then committing upon the infants
of Lombardy;--the house would be burned over his head; but, if he
escaped, how were we to get money to buy his bibs and primers? Then
his father was to be killed in the fighting, and I to die of my cough,
&c. &c.
During the siege of Rome, I could not see my little boy. What I
endured at that time, in various ways, not many would survive.
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