The Children | Page 8

questions at issue--an
interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. This is
a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of process,
and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of
progress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more than
resignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their
transitoriness.
What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world,
for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that
for the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now hold,

perhaps, that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we
should acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own
conditions.
But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a patient
prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred years ago,
nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full stature of
body and mind. The Indian woman sings of the future hunting. If her
song is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results of time,
and has submitted her heart to experience. Childhood is a time of
danger; "Would it were done." But, meanwhile, the right thing is to put
it to sleep and guard its slumbers. It will pass. She sings prophecies to
the child of his hunting, as she sings a song about the robe while she
spins, and a song about bread as she grinds corn. She bids good speed.
John Evelyn was equally eager, and not so submissive. His child-- "that
pretty person" in Jeremy Taylor's letter of condolence--was chiefly
precious to him inasmuch as he was, too soon, a likeness of the man he
never lived to be. The father, writing with tears when the boy was dead,
says of him: "At two and a half years of age he pronounced English,
Latin, and French exactly, and could perfectly read in these three
languages." As he lived precisely five years, all he did was done at that
little age, and it comprised this: "He got by heart almost the entire
vocabulary of Latin and French primitives and words, could make
congruous syntax, turn English into Latin, and vice versa, construe and
prove what he read, and did the government and use of relatives, verbs,
substantives, ellipses, and many figures and tropes, and made a
considerable progress in Comenius's 'Janua,' and had a strong passion
for Greek."
Grant that this may be a little abated, because a very serious man is not
to be too much believed when he is describing what he admires; it is
the very fact of his admiration that is so curious a sign of those hasty
times. All being favorable, the child of Evelyn's studious home would
have done all these things in the course of nature within a few years. It
was the fact that he did them out of the course of nature that was, to
Evelyn, so exquisite. The course of nature had not any beauty in his

eyes. It might be borne with for the sake of the end, but it was not
admired for the majesty of its unhasting process. Jeremy Taylor mourns
with him "the strangely hopeful child," who--without Comenius's
"Janua" and without congruous syntax--was fulfilling, had they known
it, an appropriate hope, answering a distinctive prophecy, and crowning
and closing a separate expectation every day of his five years.
Ah! the word "hopeful" seems, to us, in this day, a word too flattering
to the estate of man. They thought their little boy strangely hopeful
because he was so quick on his way to be something else. They lost the
timely perfection the while they were so intent upon their hopes. And
yet it is our own modern age that is charged with haste!
It would seem rather as though the world, whatever it shall unlearn,
must rightly learn to confess the passing and irrevocable hour; not
slighting it, or bidding it hasten its work, nor yet hailing it, with Faust,
"Stay, thou art so fair!" Childhood is but change made gay and visible,
and the world has lately been converted to change.
Our fathers valued change for the sake of its results; we value it in the
act. To us the change is revealed as perpetual; every passage is a goal,
and every goal a passage. The hours are equal; but some of them wear
apparent wings.
Tout passe. Is the fruit for the flower, or the flower for the fruit, or the
fruit for the seeds which it is formed to shelter and contain? It seems as
though our forefathers had answered this question most arbitrarily as to
the