The Age Of Impressions

Observe how very quick the child's eye is, in the passive age of infancy, to catch impressions, and receive the meaning o: looks, voices, and motions. It peruses al faces, and oolors, and sounds. Every sentiment that looks into its eyes, looks back out of its eyes, and plays in miniature on its countenance. The tear that steals down the cheek of a mother's suppressec grief gathers the little infantile faoe into a responsive sob. With a kind of wondering silence, which is the next thing to adora tion, it studies the mother in her prayer, and looks up piously with her, in that exploring watch that signifies unspoken prayer. If the child is handled fretfully, scolded, jerked, or simply laid aside unaffectionately, in no warmth of motherly gentleness, it feels toward it ; and so it is angered by anger, irrita ted by irritation, fretted by fretfulness, having thus iinpressed just that kind of impatience or ill-nature which is feit toward it, and growing faithfnlly into the bad mold offered, as by a fiíed law. There is great iinportance in this manner, even in the handliug of infancy. If it is unchristian, it will beget unchristian states, or impressions. If it is gentle, even, patiënt and loving, it prepares a mood and temper like its own. There is scarcely room to doubt that all the most crabbed, hateful, passionate, ill-natured characters ; all the most even, lovely, firm and true, are prepared, in a great degree, by the handling of the nursery. To these and all such moods of feeling and treatment as make up the elements of the infant's Ufe, it is passive as wax to the seal. So that if we consider how small a speek, falling into the nucleus of a crystal, may disturb its form ; or, how even a mote of foreign matter present in the quickening egg, wil] suffice to produce a deformity ; considering also, on the other hand, what nice conditions of repose, in one case, and what accurately modulated supplies oi heat in the other, are necessary to a perfect product ; then only do we begin to imagine what work is going on, in the soul of a child, in this first chanter of life. the age of