Child Life in Prose

Excerpt

PREFACE.

The unexpectedly favorable reception of the poetical compilation entitled "Child Life" has induced its publishers to call for the preparation of a companion volume of prose stories and sketches, gathered, like the former, from the literature of widely separated nationalities and periods. Illness, preoccupation, and the inertia of unelastic years would have deterred me from the undertaking, but for the assistance which I have had from the lady whose services are acknowledged in the preface to "Child Life." I beg my young readers, therefore, to understand that I claim little credit for my share in the work, since whatever merit it may have is largely due to her taste and judgment. It may be well to admit, in the outset, that the book is as much for child-lovers, who have not outgrown their child-heartedness in becoming mere men and women, as for children themselves; that it is as much about childhood, as for it. If not the wisest, it appears to me that the happiest people in the world are those who still retain something of the child's creative faculty of imagination, which makes atmosphere and color, sun and shadow, and boundless horizons, out of what seems to prosaic wisdom most inadequate material,—a tuft of grass, a mossy rock, the rain-pools of a passing shower, a glimpse of sky and cloud, a waft of west-wind, a bird's flutter and song. For the child is always something of a poet; if he cannot analyze, like Wordsworth and Tennyson, the emotions which expand his being, even as the fulness of life bursts open the petals of a flower, he finds with them all Nature plastic to his eye and hand. The soul of genius and the heart of childhood are one.

Not irreverently has Jean Paul said, "I love God and little children. Ye stand nearest to Him, ye little ones." From the Infinite Heart a sacred Presence has gone forth and filled the earth with the sweetness of immortal infancy. Not once in history alone, but every day and always, Christ sets the little child in the midst of us as the truest reminder of himself, teaching us the secret of happiness, and leading us into the kingdom by the way of humility and tenderness.

In truth, all the sympathies of our nature combine to render childhood an object of powerful interest. Its beauty, innocence, dependence, and possibilities of destiny, strongly appeal to our sensibilities, not only in real life, but in fiction and poetry. How sweetly, amidst the questionable personages who give small occasion of respect for manhood or womanhood as they waltz and wander through the story of Wilhelm Meister, rises the child-figure of Mignon! How we turn from the light dames and faithless cavaliers of Boccaccio to contemplate his exquisite picture of the little Florentine, Beatrice, that fair girl of eight summers, so "pretty in her childish ways, so ladylike and pleasing, with her delicate features and fair proportions, of such dignity and charm of manner as to be looked upon as a little angel!" And of all the creations of her illustrious lover's genius, whether in the world of mortals or in the uninviting splendors of his Paradise, what is there so beautiful as the glimpse we have of him in his Vita Nuova, a boy of nine years, amidst the bloom and greenness of the Spring Festival of Florence, checking his noisy merry-making in rapt admiration of the little Beatrice, who seemed to him "not the daughter of mortal man, but of God"?...