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Title: Childhood
Author: Alice Meynell
Release date: September 29, 2026 [eBook #79680]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: E.P. Dutton, 1913
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79680
Credits: Richard Tonsing and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDHOOD ***
FELLOWSHIP BOOKS
_Edited by Mary Stratton_
CHILDHOOD
COPYRIGHT 1913
BY E. P. DUTTON & CO.
CHILDHOOD
_By
Alice Meynell_
[Illustration]
_E.P. Dutton & Company, New York._
[Illustration]
“_Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years’ darling of a pigmy size,_
· · · · ·
_Fretted with sallies of his mother’s kisses,
With light upon him from his father’s eyes._”
I. TOYS
Even when we are about buying for a child the pretty toy, one thing we
always say—“And yet children love their ugly old toys best.” It is not
true, however, that children love ugly toys; they like homely toys, toys
that can be clasped very close; and though homely does mean ugly, in the
American and the obsolete English languages (because we would hurt a
word rather than our ugly fellow-creatures’ feelings), yet what children
like in homeliness is precisely homeliness, something not too bright or
good. Ugliness is dreadful to a child, especially at first sight. He may
learn to love it in a dear parent or dear nurse, as the little boy
evidently loves the bottle-nosed man in Ghirlandajo’s delightful
picture, but ugliness in a stranger is, in the strict sense, frightful.
We are imposing our own sense of humour on children (as usual), and in
its most ignoble form, when we give them grotesque toys. And as for
guys, whereby we invert the natural veneration of images, the Fifth of
November is a date which—for the sake of Sylvia—we all dread.
🥀 When Sylvia was three, she wept and shuddered great part of a day, and
some part of a night, because a guy had suddenly faced her on the
pavement. Now she is four, she cons the difficult task of assuring
herself “They are boys, they are only little boys.” You may watch
through her delicate face the horrible misgiving, the resolute reply,
succeeding each other in that innocent, faltering breast. She says
little of her fear, but gently leads the talk that way; and, when she is
told that the boy-guys have each received a penny, her dear effort is to
establish a human relation with them in her thoughts. “Pennies for them
to buy nice sweets,” she says to herself. There is the thing in common
with her own beauty and tenderness and her little appetites: sweets,
then boys—not devils.
🥀 But if we wrong our children by the grotesque we do so more commonly
by the gift of the worthless toy, a thing that will not last. The doll
is perhaps as significant as the statue, the gargoyle, the coin; it is
generally worse than even the statue. The manufactured image of mankind
given to our little girls to play with is not only ill-designed, but so
fragile as to cause more weeping than joy. The doll of commerce is very
heartlessly made so that she often goes to pieces on the very day of
presentation. Her brief arm comes off first; it had been ineffectually
glued on. Piecemeal she comes apart. She does not preserve such poor
individuality as she had, long enough to get a name. She is never named,
never grows old, never gets the love of habit, never ratifies the
rapture of possession, never justifies the first kiss. A little time—at
the best it is not long—is all that we of larger than doll’s growth have
for that ratification and for that proof. Well, it is hardly moral that
the child and the doll should kiss but for an hour.
🥀 Why, the personality of an honest doll ought to outlast her head—nay,
several (resembling) heads. It was so with the dolls of an elder day and
a simpler country. When one head was unfortunately walked upon, the old
cook took the trunk and the pieces into the town, and matched the type
of beauty—he was very grave and intent, without condescension, over the
business. The face was renewed, but the name and the affection held on
with a persistence that was almost worthy of party politics.
🥀 There have been charming toys in literature, but none much dearer to
the reader of good will than the little horse which Esther Summerson
gave to Peepy after one of his misfortunes—Esther, contemned by the
readers who think to crush Dickens by one word, “Sentimentality” (albeit
this is an emotion that would be good for the majority, and the majority
includes those critics), and by another word, “Caricature” (caricature
being nevertheless a most admirable art). Dickens, of all the greater
masters of our national Letters, has the most perfect memory of
childhood. Not by his strangely over-praised “little Nell” is this
proved, nor by any but certain brief passages of Paul Dombey, but in his
much less famous children, and in the little fists of these are toys.
II. THE STRANGER’S CHILDREN
🥀 _“Do you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” “I do bite my thumb, Sir.” “Do
you bite your thumb at us, Sir?” “No, Sir, I do not bite my thumb at
you, Sir; but I bite my thumb, Sir.”_
🥀 Across the “backy-garden,” at the rear of the house where the Children
dwelt—the child of tumult, his luminous little dark sister, and the
somewhat older ones—and over the young poplars from George Meredith’s
garden, ran a small street with shops and lodgings. It was very full of
children, and sometimes they leant so far out of the upper windows that
the question arose in the Children’s home, Would a neighbourly present
of nursery window-bars be received with little or with much contempt, or
perhaps declined, and if so with offended feelings or without? The
Children themselves did not encourage the project. The children at the
back were very proud, they said. And how did they show the passion? It
was asked. “Well, mother, they come to the window, and black their boots
at us.”
🥀 Of all the many surprises of childish replies, this was not the least.
It was given in great gravity and good faith. To these young observers
the action of their opposite neighbours admitted no other
interpretation, albeit there had been no exchange of covert verbal
defiances, such as, “Do you black your boots at us?” “We do black our
boots.” “Do you black your boots at us?” “We do not black our boots at
you; but we black our boots.” The demonstration was not of battle, as “I
will frown as I pass by, and let them take it as they list”—but of sole,
sufficient pride, silent, detached, lifted between heaven and earth, at
the second-floor windows of its appropriate street. It was not for a
mere grown-up person to introduce doubts, or to suggest how far from the
usual manifestations of pride, how different from its customary pomps,
is the symbolism of blacking and of boots. No doubt the children were
right, and declined our symbolism on their own good authority.
🥀 Their conclusion as to the boots had probably its own obscure
justification, and was not due to unworthy suspiciousness, for the
Children were disposed to friendliness, and would have inclined rather
to a lenient than to a severe interpretation of the act of demonstrative
blacking, had there been room for doubt. At a taller and quite remote
row of windows appeared the heads of other children, of whom Pride
seemed to have made no victims. At least there appeared among them no
signs of blacking. With these the more usually intelligible language of
toys was the means of communication. At long range—so long that a
walking duck could hardly be distinguished from a mechanical alligator,
and dolls looked as much alike as the heroines of a year’s novels—toy
was held up for sympathetic and companionable rivalry with toy; and
across intervening roofs, by means that yet remain a mystery, the pet
names of both batches of children had been announced and exchanged.
Never was so enterprising and prosperous a friendship on facilities so
slender. The delays, hesitations, and reserves of acquaintances begun in
the ordinary ways, in houses, in Kensington Gardens, or otherwise on
point-blank terms, never troubled these mutual advances. Or so it
seemed. But with some surprise the mother of the Children, walking with
them, perceived that they cast looks askance, neither wholly strange nor
in any wise intimate, at another walking group, equally lowering, gloomy
with an equal kind of unavowed intelligence, and with an equally
embarrassed mother. The children of Pride, walking in the street perhaps
with those very boots new-blacked, could hardly have been watched with
more sombre or more cloudy eyes. Afraid lest her young ones should have
committed the _grossièreté_ of making enemies, the mother of the
Children asked them, in their unwonted silence, who it was that they
seemed to be cutting. With surprise she then heard that these strangers,
seen at full length, were they whose distant eager heads were invested
with so much childish friendship in the windows under the skies. Within
an hour or so after that unfriendly encounter, with its shadowy
strangeness and vigilance of eyes, all was restored at the high
back-windows, and a London sunset showed the ambiguous toys—new ones,
just bought in the course of that walk estranged—the signalling hands,
and the jostling heads unequal of height, at their former intercourse,
candid, clear, familiar, and full of spirit and drama.
🥀 Distance seemed to set these gallant little creatures free from some
of the disadvantages of the world and from the uneasiness of crowds.
They were released in a world barely sprinkled with people within hail
of one another, glad of recognition, and made friends by intervening
space, and liberty partaken.
🥀 Perhaps it was the childish solitude that made the
window-communication so clear. Almost painful to the writer is still the
memory of introductions in childhood. Ah, to be placed in front of three
little natives in white embroidery, and bidden to talk with them in
Genoese, or in any human tongue, with parents artificially listening in
compliment to the stranger’s children, but solicitous for their own!
There are moments that are literally difficult to live through, and this
was of them. Solitude and a garden hedge between, or some such other
slight defence and distance, and Genoese no doubt would have flowed.
🥀 Nor can one easily forget the unexpressed misgivings at those
invitations to play with the stranger’s children in the gardens of the
Tuileries. It was already depressing enough to stand on a counter to be
fitted, and to hear the _modiste_ tell one’s mother that one ought to
have the _petit jupon bouffant_ which one had not, and that no coat
could have justice without it. But to be accosted, under this visible
disability, by the children of Paris, little girls obviously furnished
with the _petit jupon bouffant_—this was the cause of a dumb shyness.
“_Veux-tu venir jouer avec moi?_” So ran the invariable invitation of
the charming Parisians, little citizens so well civilized as to need no
defences, no barriers, no return to the space and the distances of birds
in search of primitive confidence, or to the rarity of angels in quest
of natural courage. The English child kept in the after years of life
the sense of national defeat that attended the consent to that unequal
game. If Waterloo was won upon the playing-fields of Eton, it has been
many times avenged on the playing-grounds of the garden of the
Tuileries.
🥀 Otherwise, and the conditions being more free and more nearly equal,
to play with strangers, to play internationally, was a great delight.
The game, being all dramatic, did away with any need for close knowledge
of the actor. Since yonder boy was a spirited horse of uncertain temper,
his temper as a boy was of small importance. There was no need even for
names when all the players alike were terra-cotta pipkins for sale, to
be known as sound or cracked by their voices under a blow. Quarrels
never arose in these encounters of an hour. Our playfellows were toys of
the liveliest animation, but without so much perceptible character as
might chance to ruffle our own. The concert of Europe was undisturbed.
🥀 One only remembrance is fraught with some self-reproach. It is that of
two little English girls, who chose to frighten all the children of an
Italian village and sweep the hill of them. It was done without malice,
but with a horrid sense of dominance; and without violence except that
of mere running. The population—sad to remember—was so gentle that its
full number of children, of several ages, were thus to be hunted down
the slopes of the chestnut-woods, by the onset of a couple of capricious
foreign girls. But so it was. The day was a _festa_, and the children,
carrying their shoes, strolled on the hill-side, between the cypresses
and the belfries. All things go in unequal groups on such an
afternoon—little companies of church-bell tunes, young men playing at
bowls, no one alone. The village children loitered principally about the
steep avenues to the church. But when the two slender invaders began to
give chase, the first group scattered, and then the next, perhaps not
knowing how little formidable were the hunters; then a third broke, a
fourth wheeled. Young Italians do not run without clamour, and the
outcry of the dismay of all those children seemed the wilder that the
two pursuers kept their breath for the hunting. One swept the wood,
another charged down the narrow road. They joined, they closed upon the
quarry, or in open order cut off the escape of scattered fugitives. Of
the little villagers there was not found one to resist, or so much as to
question the attack. They cried out to each other, pointing the probable
way to safety as they ran. That they must run was the one thing they
were sure of, and they sped over rough and smooth, heads down, so that
the heights were presently clear of them, and their last clamours
dropped as they reached the shelter of the street, like the cries of
birds that wheel and settle after an alarm. The two representatives of
the predominant races, who cannot have measured nine feet between them,
sat down in the conquered district, flushed with success. Alas!
III. CHILDREN’S BOOKS OF THE PAST
_Yesterday Rebecca Mason,
In the parlour by herself,
Broke the handsome china basin
Placed upon the mantel-shelf._
🥀 By a kind of dreadful punctuality of rhythm and rhyme, by the
forethought of the surname of Rebecca, by the unadorned austerity of the
anecdote, the reader is fairly subdued. Here is the “inevitable” word of
which, in recent literary criticism, we heard so much. That stanza is
written for our overthrow and confusion. It is as though a sheep had
butted us, and done it efficiently. A mother of to-day tested on her
modern children the verses—“Cautionary Verses” is the appropriate name
of some of them—written by the Misses Taylor (Jane and Anne) and by Mrs.
Turner, the creator of Rebecca Mason, for the children of the earlier
part of the nineteenth century. The little hearers were not much more
than bored. It was prose work of about the same period, and animated by
the same spirit, that had the full success of irony. Mrs. Turner had as
it were fixed us with her eye and challenged us to think Rebecca Mason’s
name to be artificially prepared; she brought her stanza to a close
which left the reader speechless. But Mrs. Fenwick must really “abide
our question.” Mrs. Fenwick wrote a book about a Bad Family and a Good.
She asks us to believe that these families lived in the same town, in
the same street, in “handsome houses” of equal size, and that they
teemed with an equal brood of six children—three good girls and three
good boys, and three bad girls and three bad boys. There is a kind of
heroic symmetry here which is ill-suited to the quality of Mrs.
Fenwick’s prose. Now, young children love to hear of large families, and
to get their names and ages precisely right. But these two equal batches
of six caused something like dismay; and when their names were disclosed
the spirit of derision sprang forth, and was not quenched again.
🥀 It is not wise to tempt too much that spirit of derision in children.
Burlesque and irony do not accord with the simplicity which becomes
them. But there is derision and derision. In this case it was fresh, it
was cordial, it was purely humorous, and as joyous as the laugh of
running races. The Bad Family’s names—alliterative—gave the signal for
the first laugh: Greedy George and Selfish Sarah; but Manly Edward and
Well-bred Charles in the Good Family were hailed with candid delight.
You might envy Manly Edward his reception, the generous laughter of a
little girl of eight suddenly confronted with his masculine perfections;
Well-bred Charles never had in his own day of a hundred years ago, from
any literal reader, the welcome he had from the honest irony of this
child. Is scorn really joyous in the heart of man or woman? It was as
joyous as ever Tennyson imagined it in the humorous heart of this
childish listener: innocent scorn, liberal scorn, intelligent scorn,
simple exhilaration of contempt. For really studious Arthur, patient
Emma, generous Susan and the rest deserved to be thus rejected with the
most cheerful incredulity; they were intolerable.
🥀 But perhaps scorn and contempt are not the just words. What the child
expresses in her loyal laughter is derision without its sneer; a sally
of cheerful astonishment at the book, at the children who took it
seriously, at the authoress who administered it. It is in fact neither
more nor less than good laughter at bad art. The child does not deride
the virtues at all; the manliness of Edward and the good manners of
Charles—so far as those qualities accorded with human life—would command
her respect in any contemporary child. Happily so, for the sense of
humour is by no means the most important sense in a young child;
credulity is better, admiration is much better, and simplicity is still
much better. The sense of humour would be dearly gained at the expense
of these. But there is no such expense. The habit of burlesque and irony
in childhood is deplorable and unchildlike. But purely childlike and
purely natural is the humour that rejects Mrs. Fenwick’s families. She
has what she merits, and even if the quality of the hilarity she causes
now were questionable, the fault lies with her. She might have raised a
better kind of laugh while she was yet at her authorship, and she did
not.
🥀 And if she refreshed no one with humour in her own day, did she fill
her young readers with any good aspirations? She was really too dull to
have any real appreciation of the manliness of Edward or of the industry
of Arthur. And see how she rewards and how she avenges. To the Good
Family she awards the approval of the street in which the two handsome
houses were situated. The Bad Family she punishes with the ill opinion
of the same neighbourhood. Mrs. Fenwick, and Mrs. Turner, and the Misses
Taylor were very small writers in their day, but they share with two
great—most diversely great—writers one certain character. They have as
little spirituality as Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. And children
are not without a sense of that defect when right things and wrong
things, and their consequences, are the matter of a story.
IV. CHILDREN’S BOOKS OF THE PRESENT
🥀 The idea that dragons are not interesting characters in a romance for
grown-up people is a modern idea. It is not a good idea, for an interest
in dragons is quite as easy, and at least as pleasing, as a belief in
some of the characters in contemporary fiction. That adult readers of
the older romance were on easy and equal terms with dragons is clear
from the fact that those romances were written not for children, but for
their elders. Even the classic and undying fairy stories—before Hans
Christian Andersen—were written neither about children nor for them.
They have been rather left to children than given to them. The grown-up
dropped them, content that the children should believe (that is,
rightly, pretend to believe) in dragons, though we ourselves prefer to
pretend to believe in the detestable people of the annual plays.
Therefore we shed our ancient love-stories and the children pick them
up, with all their wizards, witches, transformations, and delights, and
thrive on them. One of the causes of their good fortune is that they
were composed without condescension.
🥀 But the condescension of the new story-book is an offence. Some of our
annual authors evidently think that the more nonsense they write for the
little ones the better, and the more “fancy” the author displays the
more flexible will he seem to be in his performance. What, we may
wonder, if we cannot remember, does the young child think of the
flexibility of the grown-up who perform? I think he knows all about that
grimace and the value of it. Mrs. Fenwick, Mrs. Turner, and the Misses
Taylor were at any rate not humorists. If they stimulate the sense of
comedy in the child of our times, they must have quelled it in the child
of their own. Whereas, of some of our later writers, in whose eyes Mrs.
Fenwick and her like are doubtless nothing but ridiculous, it is to be
feared that they have done worse than quell the sense of comedy in
children; that they have rather made it weak with the tension of their
use; they have “practised upon it,” as used to be said of unlawful arts.
They have worn it out by too persistent appeal. I would rather have
trusted to the recovery of a child’s comic spirit after the negative
operation of a Mrs. Fenwick—even in the days when she was taken
seriously—than I would hope for a healthy condition after a course of
reading among the newer Christmas story-books of a comic character. All
is not for self-congratulation as time brings its revenges.
🥀 I find, in nearly all the little books of the day, the repeated and
repeated stimulation of the spirit of fun in its thinnest shape; and
sometimes there is to be perceived the author’s courageous hope that the
child will think better of the fun than he himself has succeeded in
thinking, when all is done; now and then the flagging heart is easily to
be detected, and the misgiving that the wary little reader may find no
more laughter in the matter than moved the writer at his work of
humorous invention.
🥀 No such anxieties beset our Mrs. Fenwick. Her readers had to know
their place. She kept the upper hand, serenely. She had no waverings,
not she. But then she was doing straightforward work; she had no
occasion for secret thoughts, and she knew none. She made no appeal to
the chances of a child’s spirit; she curried not his favour; the child
had to take what was given him. But at the end of the account perhaps he
was no more ill served. If the elastic childish sense of humour should
fail in its spring and buoyancy by reason of so much straining by the
child’s authors, if it should grow lax and flaccid, there would be much
loss rather than gain by the work of a century.
🥀 Indeed the reaction against the “Cautionary Stories” of 1813 has
carried the modern author far; and it is a helpless and a weak thing to
be carried by reactions. In all the children’s books of a season you
shall hardly find one “moral” at the close. Now children with erect
minds like a moral. And the worst thing in all these happenings would
be—perhaps already is this: that a child of to-day would be afraid and
ashamed to own that he liked a moral; would be so aware of the light
mind in his father and mother and his aunts—yes, in his godfather and
godmother—so shy of their banter, so well-informed as to their habitual
irony, so educated in paltriness and burlesque, that he would not
confess that he likes a story with good people and bad in it, a story
with free-will in it, and duty. What a misfortune! A little honest
creature covertly compelled to deny the little simple lord of his
breast!
🥀 Too much common sense—and too common—was the fault of a hundred years
ago. And now the fault is too much common nonsense—and far too common.
Since we began to find children funny we seem unable to think them funny
enough. Miss Austen did not think them funny at all. See the conscious
Anne Elliot when an ungovernable nephew had her by the neck and Captain
Wentworth disengaged her. Other children in her novels are as
intolerable as those in Thackeray’s. The children in Charlotte Brontë’s
novels are objects of her sombre dislike; of anything except natural
comedy. But even in our altered times, children are not necessarily
farcical to themselves. They would not always be clowning.
🥀 Rossetti was harassed by the word “quaint” with which he was dogged.
If modern children had a sense of that word and of what it implies, and
were fully conscious of their own dignity, they too would find it
harassing.
🥀 But between the old ways and the new came Robert Louis Stevenson, some
of whose delightful verses have the sententiousness of Jane and Anne
Taylor and Mrs. Fenwick, with the important addition of genius;
sententiousness with an equal smile. He does not clown, he makes no
grimace, but looks steadily and intelligibly into the child’s eyes.
V. FAIRIES
🥀 It is for fear of the grown-ups, or at least out of respect towards
them, that a chapter must be given to fairies. If the children do not
care very much for fairies, they must be made to care. “Who is to care
if they do not? Who is to be properly childlike if they are not?” It
was, accordingly, an illustrious grown-up who wrote (I am quoting
Francis Thompson) “Know you what it is to be a child?” Well, we all
should know, and we are generally anxious to teach one another. The poet
answers for us most eloquently, “It is to be so little that the elves
can reach to whisper in your ear; it is to turn pumpkins into coaches,
and mice into horses ... for each child has its fairy godmother in its
own soul....” And previously he had written, “It is to have a spirit yet
streaming from the waters of baptism.” Were elves really of any
importance to him? We must take his word for it, even though we may make
a slight reservation because we know that even a great poet has some
regard to what is expected. But another great poet, who never paid any
attention to what is expected from him, has told us, out of his very own
experience, not what childhood, but what one childhood, was. To Coventry
Patmore it was a time rather of divination than of credulity. His “sweet
childhood,” he names it; but it was a time of secrets, of thoughts
wholly unsuggested by story-books, unprompted by authors, parents,
uncles, godmothers, or imaginative adult persons of any kind of
officiousness. It is certain that he did not think elves to be
whispering in his ear. But he contemplated a pebble in the gravel of a
garden path and conceived the thought that but for unrelaxing pressure
it would explode into dust. Another real child—but not a wonderful child
like Coventry Patmore—walking on grassy garden paths, was a little
troubled to think how many living creatures she might be crushing; and
how short their lives were, anyway. But, she thought, as the size and
space differed between very large beings (herself, for example) and very
small, so might time; and a minute of her life might be a full year of
successions of feelings and happenings to the ant. Six years old could
not put her speculation into appropriate words (a task which might tax
sixty years old), but the thought was very definite to her. One of the
privileges of a child is that he is very near the earth; he knows moss
and the scudding creatures near it. When Oliver Wendell Holmes found the
scent of a little box hedge to be suggestive of eternity, it was no
doubt merely suggestive of time—the incalculable remote time of
childhood, which stands very fairly for eternity—because he had smelt it
when he was on the level of its fresh leaves. So Patmore, a little child
on a garden path, found matter for close thought. Truth interested him,
and fiction did not. In later years he gave himself to the truth of
science, and finally to the truth of poetry. Truth was to him more
splendid and more mysterious than any tale.
🥀 It may well be doubted whether children are generally credulous. It
may even be doubted whether Francis Thompson believed in his own elves
and their whispers—whether he cared for possible coaches and horses as
much as for real pumpkins and mice. It may be that those elves of his
were, in his wonderful boyhood, nothing other than symbols, believed in
with interpretation.
🥀 For children do not believe in fairies a jot. I have just asked my
youngest daughter whether she believed in them, and she said “Of course
not—only I liked the stories.” Fiction to children is fiction and not
fact. They are artists enough for that. And it is strange indeed that
many elders have so forgotten childhood as to imagine that they believed
in fairies, if they honestly do imagine it. What dull years have so
blurred their past that they are willing to rehearse the sham memories
of others? A belief in fairies is no child’s play. Children have nothing
to do with it except as in some countries they tremble behind their
trembling fathers. It pleased Ruskin—and for once I marvel at his
pleasure—to think of fairies believed to be so disorderly in the woods
at the back of Joan of Arc’s country that a church service was held in
the forest depths once a year, and even then they were not quelled. I
think this is the only false passage of Ruskin—I know no other. A belief
in fairies is a terrible and an adult thing, a horrible heresy, and
nothing for a tourist’s smiles. It was the cause that a woman, in
remoter Ireland, believed to be not herself but a changeling left in her
likeness and in her place by fairies, was burnt by the father, husband,
and sons who loved the “lost” one—not many years ago. This is not
child’s play; it is faith. We indeed are child’s-playing with serious
things and with serious words when we ask our children to say they
believe in fairies. Not that our request will ever make them believe;
they are honest people. But in this appeal we tamper with the word
“believe,” and palter with its sense. The pretty game of calling on the
children of the audience of _Peter Pan_ to declare their faith in
fairies seemed to me disastrous—a game of men and women at the expense
of children, a cumbersome frolic at best and an artificial, a tyrannous
use of the adult sense of sentimental humour against the helpless. I
could with better conscience use my superior physical strength upon them
than exploit them for love of my own condescension. (And yet Sir J.
Barrie has written the most adorable “pretending” story ever written
about a child.)
🥀 No, children love a fairy story not because they think it true, but
because they think it untrue, and because it makes no fraudulent appeal
to their excellent good sense. That sense they are delighted to put
aside while they “pretend.” That is their own word. Every child uses it,
and every child knows what he means by it. “Let’s pretend,” not “Let’s
believe.” Their mother does not put “Let’s pretend” into the child’s
mouth; she finds it there. Without it there is no play. But the
pretending is always drama and never deception or self-deception. Nay,
the more obvious the drama the better the child likes it, especially
when he is quite young and simple. I have always found the favourite
game of hide-and-seek to be that in which there is no mystery about the
hiding-place. The child loves best to know the cupboard in which his
mother is crouching; if he fairly sees her into it so much the better.
Then does he pretend to seek her, pretend to find her; then does she
pretend to amaze him with a rush; then does he pretend to be overcome
with the surprise of it. This game never tires. Do not tell me that this
splendid little actor is a “realist.” Even if you come to more elaborate
drama—his pirates’ lair behind the sofa, his Indians in the shrubbery,
if he deceived himself the whole play would immediately go out. You may
indeed see a nervous child deceived, and frightened, by a mechanical
toy. The mechanical toy is a silly blunder of the grown-up. The child
sees in it some ambiguous life, where life ought not to be, and cries.
There is no more fun in this than in the Irish peasant’s flames. In both
cases there is no fair pretending but faith perverted.
VI. THE INFLUENTIAL CHILD
🥀 Love is not a mystery in Japan. It would not have been a mystery in
Europe if a child—Dante—had not been in love. For mystery, religious and
passionate alike, has its source and sanction in the heart of childhood.
In like manner the love of Nature—of the landscape and the heavens—was a
spiritual mystery in the boyish hearts of Vaughan and Traherne (repeated
in that of their son and brother Wordsworth, the boy whom the cataract
haunted like a passion). By these boyhoods, remembered very seriously in
afterlife, European literature has been converted to two mystical
passions which, century by century, are its very life. Without those
boyhoods these two loves might have been fervent, exalting, poignant,
but not mysterious, not spiritual with the “golden purity,” the ignorant
spirituality of childhood.
🥀 It is said that our European manner of romantic love (strictly
speaking romantic) is scandalous to the Japanese. They can have had no
Dante. And, in spite of their pleasure in blossoms—their annual popular
tryst with cherry and chrysanthemum—it is doubtful whether the love of
Nature has ever taken an illustrious or mysterious form with these
little people. Their landscape art is gay, observant, and arbitrary; but
it is—as far as an Occidental student can interpret it—not passionate.
For landscape that proves a passion for Nature and for mystery—both the
legacies of man’s dead childhood—we must look to the great painters of
two countries, France and England; to Turner, Wilson, Crome, and Corot,
and thus especially to the country that produced the boyhoods of
Vaughan, Traherne, and Wordsworth. Many a child of our race has received
that early inspiration, and these men of early genius not only received
and remembered but put it on such record as to make it thenceforward a
part of our literature. It is accepted, it is orthodox, it is expected
of our poets. And this orthodoxy, due to these great men, is due
originally to these great boys.
🥀 But for them these wonders of childhood would have been forgotten, or
put away as childish things, by sensitive spirits who had likewise
experienced them. They would not, at any rate, have gained this high
literary honour and this literary authority. As it is, we are not
ashamed to remember what midsummer early morning was to us at nine years
old, because literature gives us authority. The light to our adult eyes
is lovely still, but the magic of its quality is gone, the memory
remaining, or the memory of the memory, or perhaps no more than the
grace of knowing that there was once a memory—
_Not to forget that I forget._
🥀 It is their own landscape, their own hour, that moves children not to
words but to emotions. Great views, I think, give them a more ordinary
and grown-up pleasure; they do not love formal gardens, even Italian
formal gardens; and on this point certainly the child is not the father
of the man. But hillsides in wild flower, calm summer seas, and those
aspects and phases of landscape to which Tennyson gave his perfect word
in return for a perfect emotion—these are wonderful to children. When
Tennyson is restored, after the indiscriminate honour and the
indiscriminate disesteem that have befallen him, to his own place, it
will be because his sense of landscape, his sense of light and of sun,
is like a child’s.
🥀 As to Dante’s love, the presence of an adult sentiment in a boy’s
heart—one should rather say in his soul and in the topmost places of his
soul—is a heavenly incident of human history and therefore may be
subject to the worst parody. I find, for example, an exceeding vulgarity
in the coquetting of boys and girls in certain kinds of American
stories. It is not a corruption of things innocent to evil; but it is
the corruption of an extreme and lofty wisdom, and that corruption, I
think, is silly.
🥀 Let us place next to Dante’s sacred love for a child the love of a man
not sacred but profane—a man in fiction as the great genius of Emily
Brontë conceived him. Heathcliff’s tempestuous love for Catherine
remains throughout the horrible story a child’s fresh love, even though
Heathcliff is worse than a man. And, albeit Catherine dies a woman, it
is to her childish ghost that he cries out of that window on the heights
before his own death; the ghost of a child, and she has been long a dead
woman, and he is old.
VII. FISHER CHILDREN IN FRANCE
🥀 Within a walk of industrial Boulogne is the little village without
hotels or a “season,” left altogether to the fisher families.
🥀 The propriety of the little boy of these fishermen is so great that
when he bathes—on Sundays—having no gear for that occasion, he does not
enter the sea unless encumbered by an apron of his mother’s, secured
round his neck. Nor does he set his feet into the first shallow ripple
until he shall have crossed himself with the sea-water. In his own bays,
apart, on his own sands untrodden by strangers and out of view, should
you follow this coast of Boulogne towards the south, you may surprise
him fulfilling thus his modest rites.
🥀 Nothing was ever more uncentralized than the fishing village of the
Pas de Calais. Except that Paris eats its fish, and that therefore from
Paris must filter down a little narrow gain—how narrow when it reaches
the hand that set the sail and drew the net, one must gather from the
poverty of these clambering streets—the village is separate, and there
is no cord of communication. Does music, for example, travel these few
miles, this longer distance made by the bad roads, the smell of fish,
and the incommunicable poverty? The boys here do not sing the tunes that
run in cities. Does the press cross the boundaries that close that
village to the world? A woman, trim and talkative, walks over from
Boulogne in the morning with so few newspapers that if the vigour of her
race should fail her for once, and she should take the little
_diligence_, her profits would be gone at a blow. There is indeed that
barrier to literature—a dialect that has to be reckoned with. That
dialect is mixed with old and alienated English; surely not because of
the small intercourse with our sailors when the fishermen go to
Boulogne, but perhaps by reason of old colonizing of a coast which, in
our aggressive days, we not only conquered but inhabited. Those
colonists were, it is true, so dealt with by the plague that not many of
them remained to improve the height and diminish the pelvic breadth of
these French people; but language is of more subtle penetration than the
influences that command the body; it prevails and clings, persists,
outlives, and wears the local accent rather than die.
🥀 The way from Boulogne lies through the quarter devoted to the
factories—the _usines_ that call the regiment of very young girls,
marching in rows, companies of friends ten strong, linked by the arm,
daily to thirteen hours’ labour. The streets of this industrial quarter
of Boulogne are old, well-built, high-roofed, shuttered, full of
character; but the factory-smoke hangs about them, and between this road
and that lie those damaged lands, neither free nor captive, subject to
accidents of country and borough, that have everywhere been laid out by
the hand that broke down the walls of cities. And then, as you climb the
hill, and turn from the factory to the road leading stumblingly to the
fishing-village, you are compelled to know that the refuse of a
fishing-village is fish.
🥀 Everywhere is woman—thick-set woman, warmly clad and with
well-drawn-up stockings—evident and active out of doors. But on Sunday
only is the fisherwoman to be seen with her baby out in the sea air.
Where, one wonders, does the baby abide all the week by day (he has a
clean little home by night with a religious picture over his neat bed)
whilst his mother is bent under the burdens, or striding on the errands,
or pushing the carts, or hauling the ropes, of the labour of the little
port? She is too much and too continually bent, strained, and striving.
She is cloudily, though not stormily, grave, so that after one has seen
her for six days earning so violently her bare bread, it is almost a
surprise to find her long-captive and long-diverted smile set free on
Sunday for her child. She suns him, sitting on a stone in front of her
own momentous and perpetual sea; and after this brief play he disappears
again from the light of sea and sun. The older children have their
reunited Sunday also. You may find on the grassy cliff two families and
one pack of cards; two fathers, two mothers, and all the children at a
game.
VIII. INTERNATIONAL
🥀 Some years ago a Paris paper opened a fund for the supply of the
diphtheria antitoxin. Public subscriptions are not so popular in France
as they are here, but this prospered. To its success went much of the
national love of children. Many of the subscribers sent their alms in
memory of children lost, and took an obscure pleasure in making their
grief half-public. They would not put into print the intimate name of
the child they had lost, but neither could they keep it altogether to
themselves. Thus they gave the initials. And when their offering was
made in the name of the _bébé attendu_ they gave their own initials.
They satisfied one hardly knows what desire to proclaim, a desire that
has no care whom the proclamation may reach, or how vaguely. Poor Grief!
Francis Thompson says she is not beautiful; she is unfortunately often
silly. It is by some such instinct that certain women are moved to tell
one another their affairs without much reference to the act of
listening, as in Mr. Pett Ridge’s stories. _Le besoin de parler de soi_,
even though restrained within the limits of initials, betrays women into
confidences without a confidant.
🥀 Yes, the French love their children, and by some good luck in their
tenderness they have not vulgarized them by bad art. Mediocrity and bad
art have been, and are, as widespread in France as in England. What
else, indeed, should mediocrity be but widespread, anywhere? But it has
never made a topic of the children. There are annually pictures of a
First Communion at the Salon, but they are among the better in a mixed
company.
🥀 As to the United States, it is surely time that we heard something
newer and truer about American children than popular fiction has told
us. The tourist, especially the French tourist, is entirely occupied
with the women. One might gather, from the letters written by M.
Bourget, for example, that there are few men in America, and that there
are no children to speak of. Mr. Henry James gave us the boy in _Daisy
Miller_, and there was the little girl with long legs who used to go
into Dickens’s apartment at an hotel and look at him. But there are no
children in the later little books, the village stories we have all
liked so much. A baby may be introduced for the sake of grown-up
emotions—generally those of one of the spinsters so common in this
little fiction; but of the child for child’s sake there is nothing.
🥀 Now what I saw of American children was quite different from what is
thought to be true of them by English people at home. They were very,
and very unexpectedly, childlike; there seemed to be some resolve to
keep them so in their language; a child was not to say that the faces in
a picture were “sad,” but only that they “looked sorry.” The children,
however, were one and all trained to be sweetly courteous; it was not
held that roughness was childlike. They had lovely considerate ways, and
were readily affectionate.
🥀 Their fault, if it is a fault, was indeed that they were warmly
inclined to an eager and easy love of strangers. This, however, is so
frequent in charming children that any mother who is habitually prepared
for the sentiment of a heartache may find all the heartache she expects,
when a child runs to the stranger with the words of love over which she
herself is apt to brood fondly every time that they come her way.
Nevertheless this welcome to strangers is a fresh and generous thing in
children, and in those who are not children. There is an impulse, at
once natural and civilized, to meet new faces with a new greeting.
🥀 And in America are the little negro and negroid boys and girls with
their sharp eyes and tiny upright braids of hair, and their
extraordinary democracy and self-possession; a something more than
equality where you foolishly looked for some deference from the negro
and some further deference from the child of eight years old. They learn
their free composure from their frank fathers. One of that friendly race
was a conductor in a train. As we crossed another train on the prairie,
he was waving delighted hands, and trying to make his shout heard in the
uproar. And then he turned a beaming face to two English stranger ladies
with whom he had exchanged no previous word. “That,” he said, “was my
brother-in-law.”
IX. INJUSTICE
🥀 Children have a fastidiousness that time is slow to cure. It is to be
wondered, for example, whether if the elderly were half as hungry as
children are they would yet find so many things at table to be
detestable. It is this childish dislike of many foods and drinks that
makes the once general rule of thwarting the tastes of children somewhat
cruel and more than a little unsalutary. For the omnivorous parent some
discipline of this kind might not be amiss; but for a critical and
discriminating child it was tyranny. Charles Dickens, to whom four or
five generations of children have owed a quite incalculable debt, shows
us Pip at the breakfast-table of Mr. Pumblechook. Dickens remembered, or
imagined perfectly, the thoughts hidden in a child’s heart at the sight
of the meal of an elderly _gourmand_ who asks questions in arithmetic
between his mouthfuls while the child, on a very ascetic diet, has to
guess the answers. Dickens was so dramatic that he could not see the
sombre children of discipline observing while the grown-up people ate,
without thinking their thoughts; he comes to the rescue of the desperate
insufficiency of their own expression.
🥀 Not only once, or twice, does he make their stature, their protest and
their lowering little vigilance his own. He knew what the deprived child
thought of him and of the other guests, and he was the only guest who
cared. That no one else seemed to have any sensitiveness as to the daily
incident of those times says much for the robust unconsciousness of the
old, and is really wonderful. How was it that people who cared at all
for any opinion should care nothing for the opinion of children because
it was disguised in the manners they were compelled to wear? Burns cared
somewhat for the ill-opinion of a field-mouse.
🥀 What an insensibility, too, to the after-judgments, to the memories
put away for the future! Ruskin has a certain unavowed pride in his
early hardships, seems to admire his mother for depriving him of toys,
and for making him peel the walnuts (of which he might never eat) for
his father’s portly guests. Well, as to health, walnuts for the elderly
who had just dined must needs be worse than walnuts for the child who
had dined long before. But if Ruskin, remaining, in his greatness, so
much the boy of his mother, the son of his father, even the child of his
nurse, in his lifelong duty to them, respected their administration,
there is another author who some years ago delighted to write of himself
chiefly owing to rancour against his aunts, long dead. Mr. Hare was a
child of that unjust time. Many scores of later wrongs must have been,
we must hope, forgiven by him during all the years in which he
remembered the oppressors of his early years. That he was really
oppressed he has left us no room to doubt; his uncles and aunts have not
been permitted to rest in the world’s oblivion—he has made a close
record of their tyrannies. But he does not seize the heart of the matter
as Dickens seizes it, reading in the urchin hearts of the children of
his friends. Neither Victor Hugo nor George Eliot has written quite like
Dickens, from within the boundaries of a child’s nature, from a child’s
stage of progress, and without the preoccupation and attitude of older
experience.
🥀 That children have to be taught self-denial is a truth that the
self-indulgent youth, middle-age, and old-age now alive, and having
children in charge, would blush to publish. Example is a good way to
teach them. Our immediate forefathers did not teach that way, if we may
judge from these records. They seem to have taught that self-denial was
good for the innocent but not for the more or less guilty. Let us
suppose then that they reasoned in this comfortable way: “Children have
a keen pleasure in life—among other things a perpetual appetite.” Here
is the injustice, for children have a thousand distastes; things are
tedious to them. We have no right to attribute to them a belief in
fairies or an unwearied delight in bread and milk, things which are
alien to their simple hearts. We have now learnt that the children
should have many and various pleasures; and we shall perhaps give them
their own when we no longer grasp so many kinds of delights for
ourselves, and when we thus gradually reverse the older order and
correct the newer.
🥀 If the French share their days and their dinners—perhaps their too
abundant dinners too abundantly—with their children more than we do even
yet, they have this in their favour—that no French Mr. Hare has so dealt
with his aunts, or has had so much unsalutary trouble, brought about
with infinite pains and deliberation, to outgrow and outlive as a memory
the better things of life.
🥀 Saint Monica did not impose all the fasting on the little Saint
Augustine. She took her share, and more.
X. NEAR THE GROUND
🥀 We lose, by mere growing, something of the good habit of familiarity
with the old and fresh earth—the familiarity, especially, of the eyes
and hands—that is the child’s amends for his neglect of the sky. We hold
our heads up—or we should do so—and lift our eyes to the horizon, and
upwards from it, and to the tops of steeples and towers; but a child
hardly looks up at all, or no higher than his father’s face. It seems
that many a grazing and labouring animal feeds through its last long day
and draws its last load without having ever looked aloft. Some kinds
lift their heads a little when they utter calls or cries, but those are
moments of preoccupation, and their attention is not in their eyes.
🥀 The eyes of a child, if not so long and so unconsciously bent away as
the animals’ from the sources of light and darkness and of the rains,
are still so little interested in the heights as to need the rising of a
bird to show them the way cloudward. The bird leaves a branch shaken,
and the hurry of the leaves makes a child look, and, before he is aware
that his eyes have taken flight, they are captured by the lark into that
unwonted liberty, and beguiled into the manumission of blue sky. The
child’s sight hardly rises but as an arrow following the bird.
🥀 Otherwise the little gaze of those untravelled eyes is busy at close
quarters with their own matters. It is not in vain that the senses of
children in their simplicity are familiar with delicate shows and
scents. While we walk, breathing at the levels of lilac-trees and
hawthorn, they have to breathe the fresh and strange odour of moss in
the woods. Nor is there a breath of the breathing undergrowth that does
not find its way to the spirit of a child, to create memories there.
Either those wild and most homely scents that are close to the ground
have in themselves more significance than have all the richer sweets
that blossom breast-high, or else it is their direct communication with
childhood that makes them magical. A child without a sense of the earth
would miss as much as a child—if one could be—without a sense of the
past.
🥀 Children poring over the ground make friends of a thousand little
creatures that the elders have long ago forgotten. The child knows the
spiritual-rustic scent of small daisies, though probably a great number
of grown-up people have not been for many consecutive springs at the
trouble of smelling a quite small wild daisy; one poet has had so short
a memory as to call the daisies “smell-less”; and so with other kinds of
growth. There are ways of the clinging of ivy, many-footed, to be known
only on the terms of childhood, and so with the little animals that find
their way in the green twilight of blades of grass. Their fortunes are
watched by children, who are so near them, and who would—if they might
but know something of the work in hand—think themselves happy to use
their superior strength and larger outlook in helping the industries of
little ants and beetles. This may never be; the errands of the hurry of
insects are not to be shared. And even in his consciousness of greater
size and all other human conditions, the child is aware of his own one
disproportionate disadvantage—he knows well that the ants and beetles
are grown up. Only in the business of feeding he finds that he can come
to an understanding with all kinds, or nearly all kinds, of small
animals, and be useful.
🥀 He finds a city of ants most pleasantly responsive; there are no
mistakes or misapprehensions. Dear were the ants in a wide stone
_loggia_ long ago, where they came up through the cracks to take their
crumbs in the sunshine, until Benedetta swept them with a besom of
destruction, and said in reply to the weeping (and, too probably, the
fists) of the children that the ants were not Christians. The little
ants—the little grown-up ants, who had something of our respect for
aunts, and among whom we perceived differences of size and of
manners—were involved in indiscriminate slaughter, like soldiers.
🥀 It is at close quarters, near the ground of gardens and fields,
that·children learn to know the countries, the counties, the north, the
south, the orient, and the occident. The country that children pore over
is surely the country of memories for which men afterwards die. For
this, rather than for any distant plains, or valleys, or even mountains
(for which armies have been said to be most willing to take the field).
The country that sent the breath and spirit of its earth into the little
nostrils of children, that was known in tiny detail, that was known in
that low region of the earthy air through which the elders pass with
their covered feet—this has always been _patria_.
🥀 It is a loss never to have lived young in countries so warm that a
child is allowed to feel the grass there with naked feet. For the feet
also ought to have communication with the fields; they have their own
sensation of flowers. Even as all the senses are distinct and different,
and as it were a separate conception of the mind, so also are the
sensibilities. They are not merely added ways of communion, they are all
unique ways. To lack the sensibility of feet that might have been
acquainted with various Nature, but that had their tenderness touched by
nothing save dead sand at the seaside, is a little loss that one wishes
the civilized child had not to undergo.
XI. DAILY TIME
🥀 I have asked a man who evidently enjoyed his mature years what was his
principal remembrance of childhood, and he has answered, without
stopping to find something unexpected—as the man of the moment is too
apt to stop—“I was bored.” Too much time is what wearies childhood.
Although we are all surprised by the speed with which, in after years,
“time flies,” as we all say, not many of us understand that there is no
flying nor creeping on the part of Time; that his space is merely
relative, and that he seems to fly now because in childhood he went on a
halting foot; or rather because he too was small and went a little way
at his great pace. But there is no other manner of measuring the passage
of time than such an act of comparison, and those who do not make it
consciously must make it unconsciously. The childish measure of time,
moreover, it is that makes ancient history ancient. If we heard for the
first time, at forty, of Cheops, of Abraham, of the Argonautic
Expedition, of Romulus, of Charlemagne, their respective antiquity in
our imagination would be wonderfully lessened. Not childhood only but
infancy itself—infancy sung to sleep—conceives great mysteries of time.
But measure the centuries by the ten-years’ measuring rod of later life,
and see what little things they are, and to what small purpose even four
or five of them are added together. Our race’s sense of time, and sense
of history, and sense of mystery is formed of the impressions of its
successive childhoods.
🥀 To return to the contemporary but differing times of ourselves and our
children: they are not, as we are accustomed to life, but more
influential still is our habit of memory and their practice of oblivion.
They do not make a custom of remembering; and a morning not thought upon
becomes a distant thing in the afternoon; last year, not voluntarily
thought upon, grows dim; whereas ripe age pauses to remember, and old
age does more than pause. “There is always retrospect,” said an old
paper-seller to me one day; he had stood at the same corner for fifteen
short though weary years.
🥀 Children, then, find the time long. Wordsworth, who so freshly, so
observantly, remembered childhood, and whose childhood, was so
influential in our literature, characteristically remembered the length
of childish time as a length of happiness—the length of a lovely day in
the summer-country; it had the length of twenty days of summer-country
in older age—albeit older age that in him loved the summer as
passionately as, in him, childhood had loved it, older age that
reluctantly saw it fly, and whispered a “Stay—thou art so fair,” to a
thousand thousand moments. They would not stay, though they seemed to
have lingered at long-drawn play over the head of the boy he remembered.
But other men, who are not Wordsworths, or anything like Wordsworths,
have connected the slow time of childhood with other things than summer
loveliness and light. “I was bored,” said the cheerful and active man of
middle-age; and we may have to deal, in the persons of our younglings,
with the childhood of persons who are not Wordsworths—hard as this
saying may be in the parent’s ear.
🥀 We should not let our children be bored; they may, they must, be weary
of their education; but that is a different thing. It is an occupied
fatigue, an active distaste. What is to be avoided is _ennui_ and the
vacant hours. Our fathers guarded them against this austerely, by means
of duty and occupation, whether a child’s duty or a schoolboy’s;
we—lessons apart—are attempting that guard by means of amusement—whether
a child’s “fun” or a schoolboy’s. Now, it is with no sour discountenance
that we may question this amusement. The world has tardily decided that
if anyone ought to be happy it is a child, the sinless one; the decision
is made with a side-glance at the more completely sinless animal, and a
wish that this creature too might have the justice of happiness. And
this is a modern resolution, and a modern wistfulness; it does not
imply, as it would seem to imply, a “conviction of sin” in the adult
heart; it is therefore not solemn, but it is very kind and just. Not in
condemnation of that temper of mind is the inevitable warning to be
urged. No, the evil to be feared is not that of making the child too
happy; it is that of using up the capital estate of pleasure. If a child
is to continue happy, to continue amused and gay, he must be entertained
upon the usufruct and not upon the capital of pleasures. Nay, even
elders, considerate enough to hold that children should not have “fun”
too unmixed, lest it should lose its charm, hardly know that it is the
very fact of “fun” that is in danger. The child over-amused is in peril
of losing amusement itself within his own heart, and not merely the
pleasure in pantomime, or the pleasure in roller-skating, in other words
the need of a change of gaieties. Alas, it is gaiety itself that is at
stake. The man who confessed that his chief remembrance of his childhood
was that he had been bored, had kept his gaiety unimpaired in spite of
that uncheerful beginning. It would have been better for him, and more
just to his innocence, if he had not been bored, but it was better for
him to have been bored during the inconsiderate occupations of his
elders and by their dullness, than by his own amusements. That is,
better of two evils. Children should not be bored at all, or not more
than is human.
🥀 Not too often, not too long, should justly be the “fun.” As to its
length, the variations of contemporary time should teach us that one
hour of pantomime is to the average young child as long as an hour of
sunny summer was to Wordsworth—that is twenty times one hour—well,
Wordsworth liked round numbers, and I hope poets will continue to like
them; let us suppose he exaggerated somewhat. At any rate the amused
child lives quickly through a long hour, as the bored child lives
minutely through a long hour. Assuredly what we owe them both is our
judgment of their different, their childish, conditions; and a little
imagination that shall take their measure into our life-accustomed
hands, and with it rule the measure of cyclic, of weekly, of daily, and
of hourly time.
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TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
● Fixed typos; non-standard spelling and dialect retained.
● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.
*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDHOOD ***
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