The Children

								

controversy, and has remained longer than the 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