Leaving home the first time, for school, has been thus pathetically
described by Southey: “The pain which is felt when we are first
transplanted from our native soil, when the living branch is cut from
the parent tree, is one of the most poignant griefs which we have to
endure through life. There are after-griefs which wound more deeply,
which leave behind them scars never to be effaced, which bruise the
spirit, and sometimes break the heart: but never do we feel so keenly
the want of love, the necessity of being loved, and the utter sense of
desertion, as when we first leave the haven of home, and are, as it
were, pushed off upon the stream of life.” Nelson, when he was sent a
boy first to rough it out at sea, felt this loneliness most acutely: he
paced the deck most of the day without being noticed by any one; and it
was not till the second day that somebody, as he expresses it, “took
compassion on him.” Nelson had a feeble body and an affectionate heart,
and he remembered through life his first days of wretchedness in the
service.
Humanity to animals has been thus eloquently enjoined upon children by
Dr. Parr: “He that can look with rapture upon the agonies of an
unoffending and unresisting animal, will soon learn to view the
sufferings of a fellow-creature with indifference: and in time he will
acquire the power of viewing them with triumph, if that fellow-creature
should become the victim of his resentment, be it just or unjust. But
the minds of children are open to impressions of every sort, and indeed
wonderful is the facility with which a judicious instructor may
habituate them to tender emotions. I have therefore always considered
mercy to beings of an inferior species as a virtue which children are
very capable of learning, but which is most difficult to be taught if
the heart has been once familiarised to spectacles of distress, and has
been permitted either to behold the pangs of any living creature with
cold insensibility, or to inflict them with wanton barbarity.”