Heaven-encompassed Infancy

The following tribute to the golden innocenee of childhood, whicli is culled iioin the pases of the London Family Herald, for beauty of conception and fulnesa of testiraony has probably never been excelled. We fail to fmd in it the celèbrated saying of Goethe, "Children are tlie flowers of tlie human world," but the numerous tender and almost sublime reí'erences to tlie writings of others in relation to tlie beauties of childhood, we feel assured will awaken responsive chorus in the hearts of many of our readers. A still greater than all these writers has spoken on the same subject, saying in the uell-known words, "Suffer litüle children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." As Shakespeare, taking a broadly dramatic view of human life, has'eased it out histrionically in seven ages, so Wordsworth, in that Ode on Intimations of Immortality which even those least addicted to admiration of Wordsworth are constrained to admire lias, trom another stand-point, for other purposes, selected four stages of progresa - and jet not altogether of progresé, for the latter stages are characteristie ratherof decline and fall.ïhe starting-point is divine, in excelsis, of celestial parentage and surroundings. Heaven lies about us in our infancy. That is the fust stage - a very different one from Shakespeare', of the infant mewling and puking in its nurse's arms. But Woidflworth's divine infancy - the soul that rises with us, our lif e's star, that corr.eth f rom afar, for "trailing clouds of glory do we come lroin (íod, who is our home" - all too soon is overcast and darkened. Shadea of the prison-honse begin to cloud np011 the growing boy. Boy is the second stage. The third is the youth, whose daily travel is further and furt her from the. East, although "the visión splendid" still encompasses his pathway, or at least lllumines it at a distanue, J5ut at length the man - and liere the fourth stage is reached - the man perceives that visión die away, 'and fade into the light of common day" - the Heaven that lay about his iniancy is removed like a scroll, the glory is departed, his na is gone down while it is yet day. In the fourth book of his "Excursión" tlie poet apostrophises the Author and Giver of life in a strain which rocalla his ode on heaven-encompassed infancy. Thuu. who üidst wrap the cloud Of infancy around us, that Thyself Therein with our siraplicitv a while Might'st hold, on earth, comraunion undisturbed. Wordsworth's quasi-l'latonism has been earried farther by more pronounced transcendentalists. Alcott regarded children as new arrivals from a higher world - a notion which one of liis biographers gently ridiculed by putting down accurately the conversation Alcott liad with a child, and in vvliich the child, not being aware that he was expected to give intimation of immortality, answered the questions put to him in i straightforward and prosaic way. For inslance, on Alcott asking, wheti i little, infant opens its eyes pon this world, and sees tilines out of itself, and has the feeling oí' adniiration, is there in that feeling the beginning of worship.the boy very sensibly replied, "Xo, Mr., Alcott, a little baby does not worship." We are reminded of a somewhat cynical passage in Aurora Leigh, starting irom the suiile of a mother that asks her baby, "You'll touch tiiat star you think ?" Babes grow, and lose the hope of thinga above ; A silver threepence sets them leaping high - And no more stars - mark that! If children are, as alleged, for the most part stupid and prosaic, they are at any rate nearer poetry than they ever will be hereaf ter ; and, unless the imagination is stifled, it will ordinarily be a little excited by many of the incidents of childhood, and by many of the beautit'ul sights whicli they see for theflrst time. "A sunset, or a beautiful niorning, or the colors of a butterfly, or a pretty bird, go to the lieart of a fancii'ul child, and seem to opento itboundless visions of a Ileaven on earth." The ftgrets are as keen as the retrospeet is familiar in Ilood's remembran ces - 1 remember, 1 remember the fir-trees dark and ltígh I nsed to think sheir nlender topa were close against Lhc sky ; lt was a childish ignorance, but now 'tia little jy To know Fm farther off from Heaven than when I was a boy. Every man, says Panl Flemming, has ï paradise around him till he sins, and the angel of an'accusing conscience drives liiiu from bis Eden. And even then tliere are holy hours when this angel sleeps, and man comes back, and, with the innocent eyes of a child, looks into bis lost paradise again - into the broad gates and rural solitude of nature. "If I love anything in the world," testifles Lorna Doone's John Ridd, "foremast 'I love children. They warm, and y et they cool our hearts, as we think of what we were, and what in young clothes we hoped to bc, and how many things have croöaed," To see our motives moving in the little tliings that know not what their aim or object is must almiist, or ought at least, tolead as home and Boften as. "Tor either end of life is home, both source and issue being o(l,'' Schopenhauer, himself without God in the world, took interrst n children, as having no conception of the inexorableness of natural laws and the inflexible persisteney of everything to its own entity ; the "child thinks even lifeless things will bend a little to its will, becausehe feels himself at one with nature, or because he believes it friendly towards him. Dante describes, or Marco Lombardo for him how Forth from His plastic hand who charmed beholdfl Her image ere Bhe yet exiat, the soul Comea like a babe, that wantons sportively, Aa artlesa, and aa ignorant of aught, Have that her Maker, being One who dwells VVith gladness ever, willingly she turn To wbate'er yields her joy. Frotn our own recollection of ourselvee, and our experience of chlldren, we know, Dr. Newman argües, that tliere is in the infant soul a discerninent of the unseen world in thethings that are seen - a realization of wiiat is sovereign and adorable, and an incredulity and ignorance about wiiat is sovexeign and changable, which mart it as the "üt einblem of the matur ( ii'istian when weaned from thin. i Qporal and living in the intim;i i iviction of the Divine Presentir." l!, is in keeping. with his friend Keble'a verse - O tender gem, and fall of Heaven Not in the twilight stars on high ! Not in moiat flowers of even, See we our God bo nigh. Mrs. Browning's rhapsody of Life's Progresa starts f rom infancy as it lies still "(in the kneesof a mild Mystcrv - when the heavens seem as near as our own mother's face is, and we thhik we could touch all the stars that we see, and all things look strange in the pure golden ether. 80, again, her stan.as 011 a child asleep teil how such "j olded eyes see brighter colours than the open ever do," and how visión unto visión calleth, while the young child dreameth on - "ííow he hears the angels' voices folding silence in the room - now he muses deep the meaning of the Ileaven-words as they come." A later minstrel, who has since become a power in the State, expatiates on the joy of renewing, witfi his sister, in fancy's lands of light, the search for those bright birds Of plumage so ethereal in its hue, And sweeter than all mortal words, Which sume good angel to our childhood sent With messages from Paradiaal flowers. 80 lately left, the scent of Eden bowers Yet lingered in our hair, where'er we went. So, too, one of America s f oremost bards is rerninded by a simple robin's song of the time When I. secure in chiklisli piety, Listenrd as if I heard an angel sing. With news from Heaven, which he did bring Fresh every day to my untainted ears, When birds and flowers and I were happy peers. líor be f orgotten the same poet's picture of that Irene, right from the hand of God whose spirit carne, and who liad ne'er forgotten whence it came, nor wandered far from thence, But laboureth to keep her still the same. Near to her place of birth, that she may rot Soil her white garments with an earthly Bpot. So again, in one of his lvrics, he hails the little ones with a summons, "Come to me, O ye Children!" to whisper in his ear what the birds and the winds are singing in their sunny atmosphere. It was to Charles Dickens that he was writing, and of little Paul Dombey that he, was thinking, when LordJeffrey, in one of his effusive gushing letters - so unlike the blue and yellow critic and castigator he once had been - expatiated on that fearleat innocence which goes playfully to the brink of the grave; and he added, with a retrospective glance that may be presumed to take in Little Xell. "In reading of these delightt'ul children, how deeply do we feel that 'of such is the kingdom of Heaven, and how ashamed of the contaniinations which our manhood has received from our contact of earth. and wonder how you should have been admitted into that pure communion, and so 'presumed, an earthly guest, and drawn empyreal air,' though for our benefit and instruction." M. Jules Simon, in one of the house and fireside chapters of his treatise on Liberty, adverts to the mysterious and unbobnded sympathy which exists between a mother and a child, and which often, he alleges, will, in one day, teach the meaning and power of virtue to the mother who had forgotten it. For a master of teaching, a doctor of learning, isthis child, whoknowsnothing in the world, but who diffuses all around hini the divine contagión of innocence. And to the child himsel f all the earth is beau ti ful. and, as Mr Froude says in his eloquent essay on the Use and Meaning of History, all J'ffe is divine; (iod is very near hiin ra I s ways, hears all his words, sees ';: I s actions, and listens to the wMspor of his feelinga ; and for the child, in the roll of the sea, in the blue sky, in tiie light lloating clouds, in the green lovcliness of the summer trees, and iu the solemn foiest shades, an ineffable mysterious Presence is for ever breathing. "The business and the facts of lite are without meaning to him. In this Presence he has his being, and all he sees around him is but an expression of its power." Thus the poet describes the child aS come freshly to us out of some more real world of spirits, in which he had his earlier d welling; and our material world into which he 's exiled is steeped in the far remembrance of his other home, which Earth. his foster-mother, in vain would temphim to forget. ('ïime goes on, an' these visions fade andgrow indistinct; they pass away out of the course of our lives, and only startle us at moments." At last the enchantment passes ofï. and the gleaming imagination of childhood is superseded by a barren and hard materiality. For, as Mr. Browning's apologetic prelate words it - Time and earth caae-harden us to live; The f eeblest aense is trusted most ; the child Feels God a moment, ichors o'er the place, Plafs on, and prows to be a man like us. More or less, argües the clerical a1 d esthetic author of the Letters to Eus' bius, all are born poets - to make, to combine, to imagine, to créate; bui, very early does the time come with most of us when we are impelled to put away, as the ' world calis it, the "childish things." The lnfant's dreani is a creation, says a feminine critic, and perhaps as beautiful as we know it must be pleasing ; for there are no sniiles like infant smiles. The beautiful is, by a Frenen philosopher, designated, i f not defmed, as the remera brance of what weadored in the morning of life - in that age of gold, when, all of us children of God. whatever we may be now, we llowered unconsciously with the fresh primroses of song, and were poets unawares. Du cid sou age a souvenir, sings Beranger of childhood - it remembers, like the sea-shHl, its august abode, has sight if that immortal sea, and hears the mighty waters rolling evermore. And philosophy teaches what especial philosophical value childhood bas - the interest of the fresh fount, springing amidst the hills to the travelier who knows the length it has to traverse and the space it bas to fertilise - the charm of the bud whose lovely bloom and luscious fruit we farther anticípate - the worth of the imperfect and broken utterances of that language which may come to be the symbol of all known thought and the expression of all experienced feeling ; and, according as the mind of the observer inclines towards the solemnities of the l'ast or the grandeur of the Future, it will appear either is trailing clouds of glory "from God. who is its lióme." or as a star emerging trom the eternal night, Imt wliose lustre is about to grow pal e before the embracing sunlight it' :i coming dav. Aa wHh philosophy, so with religión; the foreshadowing tlicologiea of the ancient and heatben world reeognised the inherent glory of childhood. while it was reserved for Christianity to say "Come now even to Hethlehem," and to afford the most affectlng and suggestive combination of iimocence with power, and purity with loye. One Holy Child bas made all children holy. To the child, as a child, poet af ter poet addressesgreetingafter this strain - Just out ot heaven! - grace f rom high around thy forehead clings, And fancy gaze till her eye can almont see thy wings ; The world as vet hatft laid no Btain upon thy splrit's light, Nor Borrow flun a Ringle chain upon its sunny ife'ht; The rose npon thy cheek still weara the colonre of its birth, 1 ts hnes unwithered by the tears and breezes of the earth; And round thee tints of beauty yet and gleams of glory play, Ar thou hadst left the skies of late, and, in their starry hadst met The rainbow on thy way. When William Blake, the artist, was ten years oíd, he saw at f'eckman Kye "a tree full of angels." Ilis father scolded and beat him: but the boy would not shut his eyes; and all through life, they teil us, he kept sight of the angels. And the angels of the children, a divine voice assures us, do ahvays behold the face of His and their Father, who is in heaven.