mother-fastnesses

Updated: May 23, 2025

To these unpruned and mother-fastnesses of the earth belonged at first the wailing infancy of all life, and even now a vague memory of it is left, like the organ of a lost sense, in the heart oppressed by the grief of the grown world. The boy unknowingly had fled to his first mother, who had soothed his old sorrow in his heart before he had come into the consciousness of it.

Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman - Jerome, A Poor Man: A Novel