- Bolton & Co. Verse:
- 48
- Full Text
- To the Mother
Say while you press with growing love,
The darling to your heart,
And all a mother’s pleasures prove,
Are you entirely blest?
Ah no! a thousand tender cares
By turns your thoughts employe
Now rising hopes, now anxious fears
And grief succeeds to joy
Dear innocent her lovely smiles
With what delight you view,
But every pain the infant feels
The mother feels it too!
Then wispers busy cruel fear
The child, alas, may die
And nature prompts the ready tear
And heaves the rising sigh
Say! does not Heaven our comforts mix
With more than equal pain
To teach us if our hearts we fix
On earth we fix in vain
Then be our earthly joys resign’d
Since here we can not rest,
For earthly joys were ne’er design’d
To make us fully blest
- Listed on Page Number
- 261
- Sampler Worked By
- Hetty Muhlenberg
- Date of Sampler
- 1797
- Place Sampler Made
- Reading, PA
- Sampler Listed on Page
- 65
- Author/Publication/Country/Date
- Steele, Anne (under pseudonym Theodosia). ‘Poems on Subjects Chiefly Devotional, London England, 1760. Vol.2 p42.
- Notes
- Also stitched by Mary Noble1808 South Berwick, ME. Anne Steele (1717-1778)
Steele-PoemsonSubjects-1760-v2
This verse was published as a hymn in 1836 “A Mother’s Joys.” https://hymnary.org/text/say_while_you_press_with_growing_love#instances