Motherhood Quote by Augustus Hare

Victorian piety rarely sounds this tactical. Hare frames maternal love not as soft sentiment but as a kind of emotional endowment: enthusiasm stockpiled early because the world will inevitably levy its taxes. The phrase "superabundance of enthusiasm" is doing quiet work. It implies an economy of spirit, where confidence and moral energy can be banked, spent down, and - with luck - still yield interest when life turns punitive. Motherhood becomes less a role than an institution designed to counteract social abrasion.

The sentence’s bleak hinge is "lost all they are sure to lose on mixing with the world". Hare assumes the world is not merely disappointing but predictably corrosive. "Mixing" makes society sound like a chemical reaction: contact changes you, and not for the better. That fatalism is tempered by a second, equally loaded word: "fated". Great actions are imagined as destiny, not choice, but destiny still needs fuel. Enthusiasm is that fuel, and the mother’s job is to front-load it before experience shaves it down into cynicism or caution.

Context matters: Hare is writing from a 19th-century British moral universe that idealized the domestic sphere as civilization’s repair shop. Mothers were tasked with producing not just obedient children but sturdy consciences fit for public life. The subtext is almost defensive: if public institutions and "the world" won’t reliably form character, the home must overcompensate. It’s a flattering vision of maternal power - and a quietly anxious admission that society, left alone, won’t do the job.