I can endure a melancholy man, but not a melancholy child; the former,
in whatever slough he may sink, can raise his eyes either to the
kingdom of reason or of hope; but the little child is entirely
absorbed and weighed down by one black poison-drop of the present.
Think of a child led to the scaffold, think of Cupid in a Dutch
coffin; or watch a butterfly, after its four wings have been torn off,
creeping like a worm, and you will feel what I mean. But wherefore?
The first has been already given; the child, like the beast, only
knows purest, though shortest sorrow; one which has no past and no
future; one such as the sick man receives from without, the dreamer
from himself into his asthenic brain; finally, one with the
consciousness not of guilt, but of innocence. Certainly, all the
sorrows of children are but shortest nights, as their joys are but
hottest days; and indeed both so much so, that in the latter, often
clouded and starless time of life, the matured man only longingly
remembers his old childhood's pleasures, while he seems altogether to
have forgotten his childhood's grief. This weak remembrance is
strangely contrasted with the opposing one in dreams and fevers in
this respect, that in the two last it is always the cruel sorrows of
childhood which return; the dream this mock-sun of childhood--and the
fever, its distorting glass--both draw forth from dark corners the
fears of defenceless childhood, which press and cut with iron fangs
into the prostrate soul. The fair scenes of dreams mostly play on an
after-stage, whereas the frightful ones choose for theirs the cradle
and the nursery. Moreover, in fever, the ice-hands of the fear of
ghosts, the striking one of the teachers and parents, and every claw
with which fate has pressed the young heart, stretch themselves out to
catch the wandering man. Parents, consider then, that every
childhood's Rupert--the name given in Germany to the fictitious being
employed to frighten children into obedience--even though it has lain
chained for tens of years, yet breaks loose and gains mastery over the
man so soon as it finds him on a sick-bed. The first fright is more
dangerous the sooner it happens: as the man grows older, he is less
and less easily frightened; the little cradle or bed-canopy of the
child is more easily quite darkened than the starry heaven of the
man.--_Jean Paul Richter._