all due propriety, with a cold and supercilious bearing toward children, which makes them shrinking and still. I have known one like the latter attempt, with uncouth condescension, to court an open-hearted child who would draw back with an instinctive aversion; and I have felt as if there were a curse upon him. Better to be driven out from among men than to be disliked of children. RICHARD H. DANA. be envied than a good-natured man watching | toward another who has gone through life with the workings of children's minds, or overlooking their play. Their eagerness, curious about everything, making out by a quick imagination what they see but a part of-their fanciful combinations and magic inventions, creating out of ordinary circumstances and the common things which surround them, strange events and little ideal worlds, and these all working in mystery to form matured thought, is study enough for the most acute minds, and should teach us, also, not too officiously to regulate what we so little understand. The still musing and deep abstraction in which they sometimes sit, affect us as a playful mockery of older heads. These little philosophers have no foolish system, with all its pride and jargon, confusing their brains. Theirs is the natural movement of the soul, intense with new life and busy after truth, working to some purpose, though without a noise. When children are lying about seemingly idle and dull, we, who have become case-hardened by time and satiety, forget that they are all sensation, that their outstretched bodies are drinking in from the common sun and air, that every sound is taken note of by the ear, that every floating shadow and passing form come and touch at the sleepy eye, and that the little circumstances and the material world about them make their best school, and will be the instructors and formers of their characters for life. And it is delightful to look on and see how busily the whole acts, with its countless parts fitted to each other, and moving in harmony. There are none of us who have stolen softly behind a child when labouring in a sunny corner digging a lilliputian well, or fencing in a six-inch barn-yard, and listened to his soliloquies and his dialogues with some imaginary being, without our hearts being touched by it. Nor have we observed the flush which crossed his face when finding himself betrayed, without seeing in it the delicacy and propriety of the after man. A man may have many vices upon him, and have walked long in a bad course, yet if he has a love of children, and can take pleasure in their talk and play, there is something still left in him to act upon-something which can love simplicity and truth. I have seen one in whom some low vice had become a habit, make himself the plaything of a set of riotous children with as much delight in his countenance as if nothing but goodness had ever been expressed in it; and have felt as much of kindness and sympathy toward him as I have of revolting EVELYN HOPE.1 Beautiful Evelyn Hope is dead! Sit and watch by her side an hour. Little has yet been changed, I think: Sixteen years old when she died! Perhaps she had scarcely heard my name; Her life had many a hope and aim, And now was quiet, now astir, Is it too late then, Evelyn Hope? What, your soul was pure and true, And our paths in the world diverged so wide, Is great to grant, as mighty to make, Ere the time be come for taking you. But the time will come,-at last it will, And your mouth of your own geranium's red- In the new life come in the old one's stead. 1 From Men and Women, by Robert Browning. London: Chapman & Hall. |