[1] See the story of the young soldier who told his officer, on having
been struck by him, that 'he would make him repent it.' (Close of
autobiographic sketch, 'Infant Literature.')
[2] Three thousand children are annually burnt to death in the nations
of England and Scotland, chiefly through the carelessness of parents. I
shudder to add another and darker cause, which is a deep disgrace to the
present age.
[3] Count Massigli (an Austrian officer in the imperial service) about
sixty years ago fathomed and attempted to fathom many parts of the
Mediterranean and the Atlantic. If I remember rightly, he found the
bottom within less than an English mile.
[4] The story and the verses are, or used to be, well known. A
schoolboy, forbidden to return home at the holidays, is suspected to
have written the lyrical Latin verses upon the rapture of returning
home, and to have breathed out his life in the anguish of thus reviving
the images which for him were never to be realized.... The reader must
not fancy any flaw in the Latin title. It is elliptic; _revisere_ being
understood, or some similar word.
[5] I allude to the _signatures_ of nature.
_II. THE LOVELIEST SIGHT FOR WOMAN'S EYES._
The loveliest sight that a woman's eye opens upon in this world is her
first-born child; and the holiest sight upon which the eyes of God
settle in Almighty sanction and perfect blessing is the love which soon
kindles between the mother and her infant: mute and speechless on the
one side, with no language but tears and kisses and looks. Beautiful is
the philosophy ... which arises out of that reflection or passion
connected with the transition that has produced it. First comes the
whole mighty drama of love, purified[6] ever more and more, how often
from grosser feelings, yet of necessity through its very elements,
oscillating between the finite and the infinite: the haughtiness of
womanly pride, so dignified, yet not always free from the near contagion
of error; the romance so ennobling, yet not always entirely reasonable;
the tender dawn of opening sentiments, pointing to an idea in all this
which it neither can reach nor could long sustain. Think of the great
storm of agitation, and fear and hope, through which, in her earliest
days of womanhood, every woman must naturally pass, fulfilling a law of
her Creator, yet a law which rests upon her mixed constitution; animal,
though indefinitely ascending to what is non-animal--as a daughter of
man, frail ... and imperfect, yet also as a daughter of God, standing
erect, with eyes to the heavens. Next, when the great vernal passover of
sexual tenderness and romance has fulfilled its purpose, we see, rising
as a Phoenix from this great mystery of ennobled instincts, another
mystery, much more profound, more affecting, more divine--not so much a
rapture as a blissful repose of a Sabbath, which swallows up the more
perishing story of the first; forcing the vast heart of female nature
through stages of ascent, forcing it to pursue the transmigrations of
the Psyche from the aurelic condition, so glowing in its colour, into
the winged creature which mixes with the mystery of the dawn, and
ascends to the altar of the infinite heavens, rising by a ladder of
light from that sympathy which God surveys with approbation; and even
more so as He beholds it self-purifying under His Christianity to that
sympathy which needs no purification, but is the holiest of things on
this earth, and that in which God most reveals Himself through the
nature of humanity.
Well is it for the glorification of human nature that through these the
vast majority of women must for ever pass; well also that, by placing
its sublime germs near to female youth, God thus turns away by
anticipation the divinest of disciplines from the rapacious absorption
of the grave. Time is found--how often--for those who are early summoned
into rendering back their glorious privilege, who yet have tasted in
its first-fruits the paradise of maternal love.
And pertaining also to this part of the subject, I will tell you a
result of my own observations of no light importance to women.
It is this: Nineteen times out of twenty I have remarked that the true
paradise of a female life in all ranks, not too elevated for constant
intercourse with the children, is by no means the years of courtship,
nor the earliest period of marriage, but that sequestered chamber of her
experience, in which a mother is left alone through the day, with
servants perhaps in a distant part of the house, and (God be thanked!)
chiefly where there are no servants at all, she is attended by one sole
companion, her little first-born angel, as yet clinging to her robe,
imperfectly able to walk, still more imperfect in its prattling and
innocent thoughts, clinging to her, haunting her wherever she goes as
her shadow, catching from her eye the total inspiration of its little
palpitating heart, and sending to hers a thrill of secret pleasure so
often as its little fingers fasten on her own. Left alone from morning
to night with this one companion, or even with three, still wearing the
graces of infancy; buds of various stages upon the self-same tree, a
woman, if she has the great blessing of approaching such a luxury of
paradise, is moving--too often not aware that she is moving--through the
divinest section of her life. As evening sets in, the husband, through
all walks of life, from the highest professional down to that of common
labour, returns home to vary her modes of conversation by such thoughts
and interests as are more consonant with his more extensive capacities
of intellect. But by that time her child (or her children) will be
reposing on the little couch, and in the morning, duly as the sun
ascends in power, she sees before her a long, long day of perfect
pleasure in this society which evening will bring to her, but which is
interwoven with every fibre of her sensibilities. This condition of
noiseless, quiet love is that, above all, which God blesses and smiles
upon.