We've been enjoying the flowers in full bloom all around us lately - roses, peonies, iris, azaleas, even the little clover flowers. 
“A mother can divide her love among ten children and each child still have all her love.”“All that I am, or hope to be, I owe to my mother.” – Abraham Lincoln
“My mother had a great deal of trouble with me, but I think she enjoyed it.” – Mark Twain
“A mother is a person who seeing there are only four pieces of pie for five people, promptly announces she never did care for pie.” – Tenneva Jordan
“You may have tangible wealth untold;
Caskets of jewels and coffers of gold.
Richer than I you can never be --
I had a mother who read to me.”
- Strickland Gillilan
“What, sir, would the people of the earth be without woman? They would be scarce, sir, almighty scarce.” – Mark Twain
This image available on Lunagirl Vintage Girls & Boys and Lunagirl Victorian Holidays Volume Two.
Another, more tragic muse for Dante Gabriel Rossetti was his wife, Elizabeth Siddal. She was the model for many of Rossetti's early paintings, the model for Millais's Ophelia, and also a painter and poet herself. Although her family was neither wealthy nor educated, she learned to read and write and began a love of poetry after finding a Tennyson poem on a scrap of newspaper that had been used to wrap butter!
Dante Gabriel Rossetti mourned her loss deeply, and buried his journal containing the only copies of many of his poems with her, tucked into her long red hair. The journal was later recovered from her coffin and the poems published ~ something which haunted him the rest of his life.
