Atlantic Monthly | Page 6

of all this people say--there
are people who dare to say--that childhood's are the "happiest days."
I may have been peculiarly unfortunate in my surroundings, but the
children of poetry and novels were very infrequent in my day. The
innocent cherubs never studied in my school-house, nor played
puss-in-the-corner in our back-yard. Childhood, when I was young, had
rosy cheeks and bright eyes, as I remember, but it was also extremely
given to quarrelling. It used frequently to "get mad." It made nothing of
twitching away books and balls. It often pouted. Sometimes it would
bite. If it wore a fine frock, it would strut. It told lies,--"whoppers" at
that. It took the biggest half of the apple. It was not, as a general thing,
magnanimous, but "aggravating." It may have been fun to you who
looked on, but it was death to us who were in the midst.
This whole way of viewing childhood, this regretful retrospect of its
vanished joys, this infatuated apotheosis of doughiness and rank
unfinish, this fearful looking-for of dread old age, is low, gross,
material, utterly unworthy of a sublime manhood, utterly false to
Christian truth. Childhood is preëminently the animal stage of existence.
The baby is a beast,--a very soft, tender, caressive beast,--a beast full of

promise,--a beast with the germ of an angel,--but a beast still. A
week-old baby gives no more sign of intelligence, of love, or ambition,
or hope, or fear, or passion, or purpose, than a week-old monkey, and is
not half so frisky and funny. In fact, it is a puling, scowling, wretched,
dismal, desperate-looking animal. It is only as it grows old that the
beast gives way and the angel-wings bud, and all along through infancy
and childhood the beast gives way and gives way and the angel-wings
bud and bud; and yet we entertain our angel so unawares that we look
back regretfully to the time when the angel was in abeyance and the
beast raved regnant.
The only advantage which childhood has over manhood is the absence
of foreboding, and this indeed is much. A large part of our suffering is
anticipatory, much of which children are spared. The present happiness
is clouded for them by no shadowy possibility; but for this small
indemnity shall we offset the glory of our manly years? Because their
narrowness cannot take in the contingencies that threaten peace, are
they blessed above all others? Does not the same narrowness cut them
off from the bright certainty that underlies all doubts and fears? If
ignorance is bliss, man stands at the summit of mortal misery, and the
scale of happiness is a descending one. We must go down into the
ocean-depths, where, for the scintillant soul, a dim, twilight instinct
lights up gelatinous lives. If childhood is indeed the happiest period,
then the mysterious God-breathed breath was no boon and the Deity is
cruel. Immortality were well exchanged for the blank of annihilation.
There is infinite talk of the dissipated illusions of youth, the paling of
bright, young dreams. Life, it is said, turns out to be different from
what was pictured. The rosy-hued morning fades away into the gray
and livid evening, the black and ghastly night. In especial cases it may
be so, but I do not believe it is the general experience. It surely need not
be. It should not be. I have found things a great deal better than I
expected. I am but one; but with all my oneness, with all that there is of
me, I protest against such shallow generalities. I think they are
slanderous of Him who ordained life, its processes and its vicissitudes.
He never made our dreams to outstrip our realizations. Every
conception, brain-born, has its execution, hand-wrought. Life is not a
paltry tin cup which the child drains dry, leaving the man to go weary
and hopeless, quaffing at it in vain with black, parched lips. It is a

fountain ever springing. It is a great deep, which the wisest has never
bounded, the grandest never fathomed.
It is not only idle, but stupid, to lament the departure of childhood's
joys. It is as if something precious and valued had been forcibly torn
from us, and we go sorrowing for lost treasure. But these things fall off
from us naturally; we do not give them up. We are never called upon to
give them up. There is no pang, no sorrow, no wrenching away of a
part of our lives. The baby lies in his cradle and plays with his fingers
and toes. There comes an hour when his fingers and toes no longer
afford him amusement. He has attained to the dignity of a rattle, a whip,
a ball. Has he suffered a loss? Has he not rather made a