a very gentle Spartan, still now and then she would make stern work of it, for we were a rough lot. But it was wonderfully beautiful to see her in her old age spreading her wide motherly wings over the children of the new day: she could no more be hard on them, no matter what pranks they played, than your May sun can be hard on your May blossom. It was the return of the heart to the soft answer, the sweet submission to the better plan, the vision of the infinite worth of gentle ways with tender folk, the endeavor, unknown to herself, to ease her dear old heart of what little pain was there from the old days, — the feeling that she might perhaps have gone more softly once with those she had then in hand; and so I want no better nurse for those we have given back to God than the good old soul who could not quite see things in this light forty years ago.

For while I have likened this gentle dealing to things so remote that I might suggest to you, even by these uncouth parallels, how entirely wrong we are when we try any thing save gentleness with these tender natures, my instances fall far. below the truth, the moment we remember that these children are not things at all we can turn out to pattern, but human beings, each one living to himself or herself, holding a secret we cannot fathom, possessing powers perhaps we cannot even guess at; our children after the flesh, God's children after

the spirit, but intrusted to our hands and to our homes, that, coming out of heaven with hints of the angels in them, they may go back when their time comes, as sealed saints.

Because, when we say that no two faces are alike, we can say with a far deeper reason, that no two natures are alike. The boy may be the image of his father; yet the life within them may be no more the same than if they had been born a thousand miles apart. We bend over these opening lives, and try to see our own image in them: it is not there. We detect a faculty, a turn, a temper, we know we never had. That holy spirit which watches us forever, selects and saves by a law we do not half understand; and so we do not understand these tender natures until we know what these powers are which are waking out of their sleep. So if we imagine the child is such an one as ourselves, we have plenty of room to blunder in dealing with him as we would be dealt by if we were in his place. Your son may be no more like you in some most vital thing than David was like Jesse.

Now, we always walk softly if we do not know our way, and that way lies through great shadows; and here is where the child differs from the machine. We know what the machine can do: we have no such knowledge of the child. My boy may have a faculty in possession of his nature, which in thirty years will be a benediction to the human family;

but to-day, through the overplus of its power compared with his other powers and his knowledge of the world he lives in, it may look like a vice to me, and may grow to be a vice, if I do not say, "The child is tender, I will lead on softly."

I will suppose he is born with an overplus of imagination, so that things appear to him as realities, which have no existence except as the magic light of that imagination has thrown a picture against the white surface of his world. And so I suddenly discover, as I imagine, that he is lying right and left; and then he gets, not a gentle guidance through which he can find the line at last between thoughts and things, but first a stern warning, and then what I call a good sound whipping. Many a minister has flogged his boy for this turn, when he ought to have flogged himself like one of the old hermits. Here is a case in which they are alike, but with a difference. The sire has been drawing on his imagination, time out of mind, for the matter of his sermons. The son has come honestly by the faculty, but he is not shrewd enough to see how far he can go without being found out. The rein lies on the neck of his power as yet, and so it carries him whither it will; and then perhaps the father even prays for him at the family altar, as if he were a son of perdition, and helps to make him one through such prayers. "Gently," I would say to such a man; "turn the lash the other way; pray for insight

and foresight this may be a rare gift you do not understand. The loftiest poet that ever sang may be but a vaster liar by your base criterion.”

We must take note that the children are tender also as we try to train them. My small daughter, speaking of a neighbor's child one day, said, "She is going to a cemetery now;" and then a little laugh went round the table at the curious trip of the tongue. But I said to myself, It may be so: who knows? These tender folk do go to the cemetery many a time through the school, or might as well be there for any chance at life they have after they come out of school. We could hardly light on a wiser or a better woman than dear old Mrs. Barbauld. Her hymns for infant minds still linger like a benediction; but she was so eager to make a remarkable man out of her little nephew, Charles Aikin, that she educated him out of his mind into idiocy. So a great many good fathers and mothers, who would shrink from laying heavy burdens on the backs of their children, do not hesitate a moment about laying such burdens on the nerve and brain. They urge them on at their books, or permit the teachers to do it, until the poor young things lose more in wealth of life, and life's worth, than their education will ever pay for. Lead on softly, then, in these paths of learning. If your children want to rush ahead at a pace which will

1 Mrs. Farrar's Recollections of Seventy Years.

leave them learned invalids, hold them back; a true education is not a long fever. Here and there a child may need to be urged on a little; but I frankly confess, that under the high pressure of our public schools I take the children's side in all their little plots to stay away a day from school when they have been hard at work for many days. I like to plot with them. Their success pleases me, more than their failure. If they will be frank, and bring the matter before the home tribunal, they can always be sure of one advocate who will plead their cause with a moving eloquence rooted in old memories of half-holidays that are written in letters of gold.

In the culture of the heart, also, we must lead on softly. I can no more believe that hard and cruel thoughts of God will be good for my children, than I can believe in hard and cruel words and blows. I have no doubt there are more so-called infidels made and confirmed to that end, by fathers who thought they were doing God service, than there are of any other type, especially among the cultivated classes. Such a course may have answered well enough for the father. He had got along, it may be, to where such thoughts could do him no great harm when they struck him. There was no such reality in them at any time as there is in what he does in the bank, or what he thinks as he watches the molten iron in the furnace. But, while this is theology to him, it is very often grim,