CHAPTER IV.CHILDREN.
The odd one.
One sometimes sees launched into a family circle a child of so different a nature from all the rest, that it might seem as if, like an aërolite, he had fallen out of another sphere.
Child’s intensity.
In childhood the passions move with a simplicity of action unknown to any other period of life, and a child’s hatred and a child’s revenge have an intensity of bitterness entirely unalloyed by moral considerations; and when a child is without an object of affection and feels itself unloved, its whole vigor of being goes into the channels of hate.
Child instinct.
That instinctive sense by which children and dogs learn the discerning of spirits.
Childish antipathies.
Among the many unexplained and inexplicable woes of childhood are its bitter antagonisms, so perfectly powerless, but often so very decided, against certain of the grown people who control it. Perhaps some of us may remember respectable, well-meaning people, with whom in our mature years we live in perfect amity, but who in our childhood appear to us bitter enemies. Children are remarkably helpless in this respect, because they cannot choose their company and surroundings as grown people can; and are sometimes entirely in the power of those with whom their natures are so unsympathetic that they may almost be said to have a constitutional aversion to them.
Getting used to the world.
Nobody that has not suffered from such causes can tell the amount of torture that a child of a certain nervous formation undergoes in the mere process of getting accustomed to his body, to the physical forces of life, and to the ways and doings of that world of grown-up people who have taken possession of the earth before him, and are using it, and determined to go on using it, for their own behoof and convenience, in spite of his childish efforts to push in his little individuality, and seize his little portion of existence. He is at once laid hold upon by the older majority as an instrument to work out their views of what is fit and proper for himself and themselves; and if he proves a hard-working or creaking instrument, has thefurther capability of being rebuked and chastened for it.
Quiet children.
I was one of those children who are all ear,—dreamy listeners, who brood over all that they hear, without daring to speak of it.
Individuality in children.
He was one of those children who retreat into themselves and make a shield of quietness and silence in the presence of many people, while Tina, on the other hand, was electrically excited, waxed brilliant in color, and rattled and chattered with as fearless confidence as a cat-bird.
A child’s philosophy.
“But, Tina, mother always told us it was wicked to hate anybody. We must love our enemies.”
“You don’t love old Crab Smith, do you?”
“No, I don’t; but I try not to hate him,” said the boy. “I won’t think anything about him.”
“I can’t help thinking,” said Tina; “and when I think, I am so angry! I feel such a burning in here!” she said, striking her little breast; “it’s just like fire.”
“Then don’t think about her at all,” said the boy; “it isn’t pleasant to feel that way. Think about the whip-poor-wills singing in the woods over there,—how plain they say it, don’t they?—And the frogs all singing, with their little,round, yellow eyes looking up out of the water; and the moon looking down on us so pleasantly! she seems just like mother!”
A child’s questions.
Is there ever a hard question in morals that children do not drive straight at in their wide-eyed questioning?
Holiness of infancy.
The wise men of the east at the feet of an infant, offering gifts, gold, frankincense, and myrrh, is just a parable of what goes on in every house where there is a young child. All the hard and the harsh, the common and the disagreeable, is for the parents,—all the bright and beautiful for their child.
Pure joy.
Childhood’s joys are all pure gold.
Mischief.
“Of all the children that ever she see, he beat all for finding out new mischief,—the moment you make him understand he mustn’t do one thing, he’s right at another.”
Different temperaments.
“Mis’ Pennel ought to be trainin’ of her up to work,” said Mrs. Kittridge. “Sally could oversew and hem when she wa’ n’t more ’n three years old; nothin’ straightens out children like work. Mis’ Pennel she jest keeps that ar’ child to look at.”
“All children a’n’t alike, Mis’ Kittridge,” said Miss Roxy, sententiously. “This ’un a’n’t like your Sally. ‘A hen and a bumble-bee can’t be fetched up alike,’ fix it how you will!”
Child’s buoyancy.
All the efforts of Nature, during the early years of a healthy childhood, are bent on effacing and obliterating painful impressions, wiping out from each day the sorrows of the last, as the daily tide effaces the furrows on the seashore.
Unseen dangers.
Neither of them had known a doubt or a fear in that joyous trance of forbidden pleasure, which shadowed with so many fears the wiser and more far-seeing heads and hearts of the grown people; nor was there enough language yet in common between the two classes to make the little ones comprehend the risk they had run.
Perhaps our older brothers, in our Father’s house, look anxiously out when we are sailing gayly over life’s sea, over unknown depths, amid threatening monsters, but want words to tell us why what seems so bright is so dangerous.
Love of solitude.
The island was wholly solitary, and there is something to children quite delightful in feeling that they have a little, lonely world all to themselves. Childhood is itself such an enchanted island, separated by mysterious depths from the main land of nature, life, and reality.
Fate.
But babies will live, all the more when everybody says it is a pity they should. Life goes on as inexorably in this world as death.
Sensitive natures.
There are natures sent down into this harsh world so timorous, sensitive, and helpless in themselves, that the utmost stretch of indulgence and kindness is needed for their development,—like plants which the warmest shelf of the green-house and the most watchful care of the gardener alone can bring into flower.
Child’s reasoning.
“It’s curious what notions chil’en will get in their heads,” said Captain Kittridge. “They put this an’ that together and think it over, an’ come out with such queer things.”
A child’s love.
The hearts of little children are easily gained, and their love is real and warm, and no true woman can become the object of it without feeling her own life made brighter.
A child’s longing for sympathy.
But the feelings of grown-up children exist in the minds of little ones oftener than is supposed; and I had, even at this early day, the same keen sense of all that touchedthe heart wrong; the same longing for something which should touch it aright; the same discontent with latent, matter-of-course affection, and the same craving for sympathy, which has been the unprofitable fashion of this world in all ages. And no human being possessing such constitutionals has a better chance of being made unhappy by them than the backward, uninteresting, wrong-doing child. We can all sympathize, to some extent, withmenandwomen; but how few can go back to the sympathies of childhood; can understand the desolate insignificance of not being one of thegrown-uppeople; of being sent to bed, to beout of the wayin the evening, and to school, to be out of the way in the morning; of manifold similar grievances and distresses, which the child has no elocution to set forth, and the grown person no imagination to conceive.
A child’s power.
Ah, these children, little witches, pretty even in all their faults and absurdities. See, for example, yonder little fellow in a naughty fit. He has shaken his long curls over his deep-blue eyes, the fair brow is bent in a frown, the rose-leaf lip is pursed up in infinite defiance, and the white shoulder thrust angrily forward. Can any but a child look so pretty, even in its naughtiness?
Then comes the instant change; flashing smiles and tears, as the good comes back all in a rush, and you are overwhelmed with protestations,promises, and kisses! They are irresistible, too, these little ones. They pull away the scholar’s pen, tumble about his paper, make somersets over his books; and what can he do? They tear up newspapers, litter the carpets, break, pull, and upset, and then jabber unheard-of English in self-defense; and what can you do for yourself?
The child as teacher.
Wouldst thou know, O parent, what is thatfaithwhich unlocks heaven? Go not to wrangling polemics, or creeds and forms of theology, but draw to thy bosom thy little one, and read in that clear, trusting eye the lesson of eternal life. Be only to thy God as thy child is to thee, and all is done. Blessed shalt thou be, indeed, when “a little child shall lead thee.”
Baby’s dreams.
“An’ it’s a blessin’ they brings wid ’em to a house, sir; the angels come down wid ’em. We can’t see ’em, sir; but, bless the darlin’, she can. An’ she smiles in her sleep when she sees ’em.”
Mother pride.
A heavenly amusement, such as that with which mothers listen to the foolish-wise prattle of children just learning to talk.
A child’s defense.
“The fact is, when I begin to talk, she gets her arms around my old neck, and falls to weeping and kissing me at such a rate as makes a fool of me. If the child would only be rebellious, one could do something; but this love takes all the stiffness out of one’s joints.”
Child’s mission.
“What would the poor and lowly do without children?” said St. Clare, leaning on the railing, and watching Eva, as she tripped off, leading Tom with her. “Your little child is your only true Democrat. Tom, now, is a hero to Eva; his stories are wonders in her eyes, his songs and Methodist hymns are better than an opera, and the traps and little bits of trash in his pocket a mine of jewels, and he the most wonderful Tom that ever wore a black skin. This is one of the roses of Eden, that the Lord has dropped down expressly for the poor and lowly, who get few enough of any other kind.”
Animation.
She was one of those busy, tripping creatures, that can no more be contained in one place than a sunbeam or a summer breeze.
Unperverted taste.
Children are unsophisticated, and like sugar better than silver any day.
Child-faith.
Dolly was at the happy age when anything bright and heavenly seemed credible, and had the child-faith to which all things are possible. She had even seriously pondered, at times, the feasibility of walking some day to the end of the rainbow, to look for the pot of gold which Nabby had credibly assured her was to be found there; and if at any time in her ramblings through the woods a wolf had met her, and opened a conversation, as in the case of Little Red Riding Hood, she would have been no way surprised, but kept up her part of the interview with becoming spirit.
Simplicity.
“Mother,” she said, soberly, when she lay down in her little bed that night, “I’m going to ask God to keep me humble.”
“Why, my dear?”
“Because I feel tempted to be proud,—I can make such good bread!”
Hobbies.
He bores everybody to death with his locomotive as artlessly as grown people do with their hobbies.
Our Charley.
When the blaze of the wood-fire flickers up and down in our snug evening parlor, there dances upon the wall a little shadow, with a pug nose, a domestic household shadow—a busy shadow—a little restless specimen of perpetual motion, and the owner thereof is “our Charley.” Now we should not write about him and his ways, if he were strictly a peculiar and individual existence of our own home-circle; but it is not so. “Our Charley” exists in a thousand, nay, a million families; he has existed in millions in all time back; his name is variously rendered in all the tongues of the earth; in short, we take “our Charley” in a generic sense, and we mean to treat of him as a little copy of the grown man—enacting in a shadowy ballet by the fireside all that men act in earnest in after life. He is a looking-glass for grown people, in which they may see how certain things become them—in which they may sometimes even see streaks and gleamings of something wiser than all the harsh conflict of life teaches them.
Heavenly children.
It seems to me that lovely and loving childhood, with its truthfulness, its frank sincerity, its pure, simple love, is so sweet and holy an estate that it would be a beautiful thing in heaven to have a band of heavenly children, guileless, gay, and forever joyous—tender spring blossoms of the Kingdom of Light. Was it of such whom He had left in his heavenly home our Savior was thinking, when He took little children up in his arms, and blessed them, and said, “of such is the Kingdom of Heaven?”
Poetry and prose.
The first child in a family is its poem,—it is a sort of nativity play, and we bend before the young stranger with gifts, “gold, frankincense, and myrrh.” But the tenth child in a poor family isprose, and gets simply what is due to comfort. There are no superfluities, no fripperies, no idealities, about the tenth cradle.
A child’s crosses.
My individual pursuits, my own little stock of interests, were of course of no account. I was required to be in a perfectly free, disengaged state of mind, and ready to drop everything at a moment’s warning from any of my half-dozen seniors. “Here, Hal, run down cellar and get me a dozen apples,” my brother would say, just as I had half-built a block-house. “Harry, run upstairs and get thebook I left on the bed”—“Harry, run out to the barn and get the rake I left there”—“Here, Harry, carry this up garret”—“Harry, run out to the tool-shop and get that”—were sounds constantly occurring—breaking up my private, cherished little enterprise of building cob-houses, making mill-dams and bridges, or loading carriages, or driving horses. Where is the mature Christian who could bear with patience the interruptions and crosses in his daily schemes that beset a boy?
Repression.
When children grow up among older people, and are pushed and jostled and set aside in the more engrossing interests of their elders, there is an almost incredible amount of timidity and dumbness of nature, with regard to the expression of inward feeling,—and yet, often at this time, the instinctive sense of pleasure and pain is fearfully acute. But the child has imperfectly learned language; his stock of words, as yet, consists only in names and attributes of outward and physical objects, and he has no phraseology with which to embody a mere emotional experience.