Education in the Home, the Kindergarten, and the Primary School

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

She said she had his bread and milk put on a little table opposite her easy-chair, and when he was happily engaged, she said, "F., I think our Heavenly Father will soon take me to Himself." He looked up with an expression of great feeling, and said tenderly: "Do you? Then you will get rid of that poor, sick body, and your cough;" and he added presently, "Perhaps he will give you wings!" She said nothing could be likened to the impression of peace and sweetness which these simple words made upon her. Soon after, he said, "But what will be done with your poor old body?" (She said he spoke as if it was of not much importance.) She replied, "Your father and Aunt Lizzy will take it to Cambridge in a carriage, and put it into the ground; and the grass will grow over the place, and sometimes you can come to the place; and I guess I shall look out of heaven and see you." But in a few minutes he began to cry, and said, "I want to go with you into the sky." She said, "Oh, you have a nice little body, which gives you a great deal of pleasure, and you must stay here with poor, dear father! What would he do when he has no wife any longer, without his little boy to make him happy, and take care of him when he grows old?" After a little more of such remonstrance he said, "Well, I will stay with him!" It was curious that in talking with me he never referred to this subject of his mother's approaching death, which evidently had touched him tenderly, and I did not introduce the subject.

It was also a curious circumstance, that after this matter of death was, as it were, settled satisfactorily, and the mind of his mother freed from all trouble on the point, the love of this life, to which she had hitherto been more than indifferent, sprang up in her with great energy, and she proposed to break up the house, and go to Florida for cure! Her husband and I could not share the hope, but we could not but sympathize in the new joy in life, that she seemed to have received from her now happy child, with whom she had learnt to live in the spirit. Things were so arranged that she made her husband's father's house, about thirty miles distant, the first goal of her journey. She reached with great fatigue this first stage, and stopped to rest, and never mentioned Florida afterwards. She breathed on another year, during which time I only saw her in weekly visits, having returned to Mr. Alcott's school in Boston. Her disease was not very painful, but so lingering that every trace of her former beauty was lost in the ghastly emaciation.

There were in the house two little cousins, younger than F., taken care of exclusively by a very sweet mother, and this gave him the most desirable social intercourse and play that took the place of our discourses at the right moment, and called into action very sweet traits of character. My weekly visit of a day or two was a great affair to the children. I told them stories, innumerable variations of The Story without an End, and of Pilgrim's Progress, modified to their infant minds. I always repeated the stories in precisely the same words (which is a great point in telling stories to children, and impresses them on the memory), and they became very familiar with the ends of my paragraphs, and would take them from my lips, and repeat them as a chorus. Thus when I had got Pilgrim laid away in the upper chamber of the House Beautiful, whose white draperies I minutely described, they would all interrupt me, and sing out, "And the name of that chamber was Peace." So of the last words of other paragraphs that I purposely made epigrammatic.

The substantial character of the child's piety and sense of immortality, which I have described as bubbling up at the name Heavenly Father, spoken at the right time, and in the right way, was exhibited unmistakably in his after life, and began to express itself at once in his association with his little cousins, which proved a very timely thing for him, bringing out his moral character by means of what he constantly did to make them happy, and keep them good, but he never said anything to them about the Heavenly Father. That subject seemed reserved for me.

It was amusing to see how fatherly he was to the little one, and he continued this fatherly manner all his after life to all the children with whom he came in contact, and even during his childhood it was singularly unmixed with any tyranny or managing spirit. He would play as they wanted to with them. He seemed to be drawn to children because he could so easily understand their innocence, and make them happy by his companionship, and because he enjoyed them.

All his subsequent life he exhibited an exquisite sensibility to beauty, which he continued to accept as the Creator's smile of consent; the very good pronounced on everything which He had made. In the last part of his mother's life, she became so frightfully emaciated, that it was evidently painful for him to look at her; but he said nothing about it; and it was sweet to see the delicacy with which he tried to conceal this pain from her, when he was admitted into the room to see her, which, at length, came to be only in the middle of the day, when she was seated in an easy-chair, with a broad white footstool at her feet. He would come into the room, looking on the floor, and seat himself on the footstool, with his back partly turned to her, and, drawing down her hands, cover them with kisses: he refused, as it were, to recognize her, under that ghastly mask, which, however, did not shut off from his remembrance, her former loveliness; for, as soon as she was really dead, and he began to think of her in heaven, she became his standard of beauty. During the little more than a year that he continued under my care, "not so beautiful as my mother," or "as beautiful as my mother" were words very frequently in his mouth. As she approached her death, she was so careful lest he should have any of the shock which her own mother's death gave to her, that she readily consented that he should go for the last few days with the other children to stay with a kind neighbor. He was therefore not present at her death; neither was I. It was an event greatly longed for by herself, at last, and its approach, which she knew before any one else discerned any special change, seemed to gladden her. Her last breath was peaceful; her last words, "Give my love to F."

I told him of the event the morning after the funeral, from which I returned with his father, in the dusk of the evening, calling for the child to go home and sleep with me, which he always was delighted to do. He was put to bed in the room where his mother had died, and I went in with him, to explain her absence, if he should notice it. But he was tired, and so occupied with my presence, he did not,—not even when he woke in the morning. At last, I said to him, "Do you see what room we are in?" He rose up and looked around, and said, "Why, it is my mother's chamber! Where is my mother?" I paused a moment to see if he would divine the truth, and then said, "The dear Heavenly Father has taken her at last!" He fell back on the pillow, with a single exclamation of not painful wonder, and a countenance sublime with the mingled expression of awe, love, and joyful satisfaction. The fact of her absent body seemed to be a more palpable proof of the truth of her deathless soul, than even her form and word, which had represented it to his senses. He was "silent, as we grow when feeling most," as if he realized that he was in the presence of the "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." You may be sure I respected this sacred silence, which seemed to me to last several minutes, but possibly it was only one. At last he said gently, "Was the window open?" I replied, "I don't know; I only know our Heavenly Father, who is everywhere, you know, took her to himself. He does not mind about windows, you know." "No, indeed! I know that very well," he said, with a little laugh (as if he wondered at his momentary lapse of thought). Soon he asked, "Did He give her a new body right away?" "I do not know anything more about that than you do," I replied; "I only know He will do better things for her than we can think of." "Do you think," said he, "that she looks beautiful as she used to?" but, before I could reply, he suddenly added, "I want to go to my mother. I want to see her now," and began to cry.

I kissed him, and began gently to recall the conversation that she had had with him the day she told him she expected soon to leave him; and, after a while, he said spontaneously, as he had done when he talked with her he "would stay with his father to comfort him for the loss of her." His father told me afterwards, that when he saw him, he went over the same ground again, beginning with saying that he wanted to go to her; but when his father represented to him how solitary he should be with no wife or son to show their love to him, F. closed the conversation with the words, "Well, I will stay with you till I grow up" (as if it was quite within his option to do so or not).

Very soon after this I took him away with me to Salem, where he remained in our family for a year or more, I think. My father's family were living at the corner of an old burial ground, two sides of the house being bordered by it. The day we arrived we went directly to my sister Sophia's room, which looked out upon this burial ground. He was immediately attracted to the window by the trees, and exclaimed joyfully, "Oh, Aunt Lizzy, what a beautiful green garden this is! What are those things?" (referring to the tomb stones.) I replied: "That green garden is where people lay away, underground, the poor old worn-out dead bodies of their friends, who are with our Father in Heaven, and those things are called tombstones; they are put there with the names carved on them of the persons whose bodies are buried in those spots." He at once seemed greatly interested and pleased, and became still more so after he had seen some burials; his emotions of joy at the thought of the enfranchised spirits entering on their heavenly life, being tempered with tender sympathy for the bereaved friends in their mourning-robes, whom he sometimes saw weeping at the earthly parting. He was always very anxious to know how the buried ones had died, from what particular sickness or danger they had escaped; and one day when my sister Mary came back from a walk, he joyfully told her that he had found out another way in which souls went to heaven. She, of course, asked him, "What way?" and he said, "Why, sometimes ships that go to sea are driven by the wind against some rocks and broken to pieces, and all the men's bodies are drowned, and they go to heaven through the water." Another time, he ran to her in great excitement, and said: "Oh, Aunt Mary! I saw a little baby's body buried in the green garden; some carriages came, and there was a hole dug already, and people got out of the carriages, and one man had a little box in his arms in which the baby's body was; and they put some ropes around it, and let it down; and then they filled up the hole with the dirt, and I saw the little baby fly up, fly up, fly up!" and he accompanied the words with a circular gesture of his arm. Whether the subjective conception was so vivid, that it reproduced itself to his imagination in an objective form, as the Sistine Madonna is said to have done to Raphael; or it was what is called "a spiritual manifestation"; it was evidently a reality to him, and no comment was made, except that my sister said, "I never saw a soul fly up."

I should say here that this child was not imaginative, and we never saw in him the smallest untruthfulness in speech or act, nor tendency to exaggeration. In this he resembled both his parents. Afterwards, he became something of a scientist, and studied medicine for his profession. He was a good classical scholar in college, and before his early death, had completed in manuscript the history of one of the mechanical arts. I think he was not of a visionary temperament. (See [Appendix E].)