[Character by Samuel Smiles]@TWC D-Link book
Character

CHAPTER II
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The poet's mother maintained the family, after her unworthy husband had deserted her; and, at her death, Gray placed on her grave, in Stoke Pogis, an epitaph describing her as "the careful tender mother of many children, one of whom alone had the misfortune to survive her." The poet himself was, at his own desire, interred beside her worshipped grave.
Goethe, like Schiller, owed the bias of his mind and character to his mother, who was a woman of extraordinary gifts.

She was full of joyous flowing mother-wit, and possessed in a high degree the art of stimulating young and active minds, instructing them in the science of life out of the treasures of her abundant experience.

[1112] After a lengthened interview with her, an enthusiastic traveller said, "Now do I understand how Goethe has become the man he is." Goethe himself affectionately cherished her memory.

"She was worthy of life!" he once said of her; and when he visited Frankfort, he sought out every individual who had been kind to his mother, and thanked them all.
It was Ary Scheffer's mother--whose beautiful features the painter so loved to reproduce in his pictures of Beatrice, St.Monica, and others of his works--that encouraged his study of art, and by great self-denial provided him with the means of pursuing it.

While living at Dordrecht, in Holland, she first sent him to Lille to study, and afterwards to Paris; and her letters to him, while absent, were always full of sound motherly advice, and affectionate womanly sympathy.


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