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

by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

You will observe that in all this spontaneous act of devotion, there was no petition. In the fulness of his happy life, and, as I think, in the faith that God was giving him everything needful, and more, he never thought of asking for anything.

Temptation to wrong-doing had not yet revealed the need that the progressing spirit always feels of more goodness and love, which I had taken care to represent that God gave whenever the soul acknowledged to itself its need and aspired for more of this, its vital substance. For it is my opinion that prayer should always be for spiritual good only, in order that our religion should be pure from self-seeking, and generously self-forgetting in its aspirations for perfection.

A little while after this incident, my sister was reading to him, and came to a sentence in which were the words "morning and evening prayer." He immediately stopped her and asked her, "What does that mean, that word prayer?" She said, "Many grown up people, when they wake in the morning, and find that God has taken care of them in the night when they could not take care of themselves, and given them a new day after their good sleep, feel very thankful, and love to tell God so, just as you did the other day when you thanked God for so many things; and besides, remembering that there are a good many things they ought to do, and that He gives the love and goodness, they like to ask Him beforehand to give them what they shall need to be good with when the time comes to want it; and at night, after they have got through the day, they like to thank Him for all the joys of the day, and they ask Him to take care of them through the night that is coming, when they shall be asleep and cannot take care of themselves; and this loving talk with God is called the morning and evening prayer." I think she added that when she was little she used to say, when she was going to bed:—

"Now I lay me down to sleep;
I pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take;"

and that was her evening prayer. "I think it is a very good way," said he, "and I mean to do so this very night when I go to bed." And it was true that when he went to bed, he remembered and made a similar thanksgiving to his former one in kind, and closed with this little verse. And again in the morning he began the first thing to thank God for the new day, etc. Nor did he forget afterwards, night and morning, to give thanks and utter prayers spontaneously, and seemed to enjoy it.

One morning he waked me with his loud singing, and as soon as I opened my eyes, said to me, "Aunt Lizzy, I am singing my morning prayer." I said, "There was a wonderful little shepherd boy once, whose name was David, who loved God as you do, and who always sang his prayers." Immediately he wanted to know all about him, and I told him the story of David in his childhood and up to the time he was sent for to sing to King Saul; and I ended with saying that I would read to him some of David's psalms (as these sung prayers were called); and this I did, and the eloquence of the sweet singer of Israel seemed to vivify his idea of the Heavenly Father, and of His connection with the soul within us all and the world without. Especially I tried on him the effect of the Psalm beginning, "The heavens are telling of the glory of God," whose rhythm had charmed my own childhood, even before I fully comprehended it; and he liked to hear it, too. Before this, I had read considerably from the Bible to him, for he had one day said that he wondered how the world began to be in the first place, and I had said: "Yes, everybody wonders about that. But there is a book (pointing to the Bible) where one of the first men told about how it seemed to him, and I will read it to you." So I opened the book and began the first chapter of Genesis, without introductory comment. When I came to the words "And there was light," he sprang up and shouted, "Directly when He said 'Let there be light,' there was light directly!"

I wished Longinus could have heard the confirmation of his great criticism. Immediately he ran into my father's study, which was across the entry, and burst out, "Dr. Peabody, when it was all dark and there was nothing made, God said, 'Let there be light, and there was light' directly! directly!" This was not enough; he ran to find my mother and sister, and again repeated the simply sublime words.

Then he came back to me to hear the rest, and I finished the chapter which he wanted me to read to him again and again, day after day. I read afterwards the parable of Jotham, which he liked to hear very much. I cannot help thinking how much more I might have made of that very parable for his moral culture had I then known of Frœbel's gospel of work. I can hardly bear to think how stupid I was; the effect of not having had the kindergarten education myself.

But he was too soon taken away from my observation, not without my acquiescence, however; for it was to go to his father, who, I thought, needed his companionship. And as it was at a distance that he lived, and, as afterwards my own life was full of vicissitude for many years, I lost the run of him entirely. There was a mutual misunderstanding between his father and me, for several years, from his thinking I wanted to be free from the care of him, and I thinking he did not desire my personal influence on him, and we were both mistaken, as we found out afterwards. When he went to Harvard College, he came to see me, and the interview was very interesting. He had a sweet, though it had become a dim, remembrance of a happy time with us, succeeded, as he told me, by a lack-love experience of years of a dark, gloomy time at a boarding-school, to which he was sent when he was eight years old, because, as he said, his grandmother thought he ought not to be living with his solitary father at a hotel. But the boarding-school proved more than a heart solitude, as the boys were rough and cruel to him in their unguided play. While he was with me, on the occasion of this call, it happened that my sister Sophia's children came into the room where we were. They had a very vivid idea of him from their mother, she having often spoken of him to them, and telling them of his joy in learning he had a Heavenly Father, when he had never thought or been told of it. When I said to them, "This is F.," one of them said, "Is this F.? I thought he was a little boy," looking at him wonderingly, surprised to see a grown-up man. I told him they were well acquainted with his childhood. It touched him very much, and the conversation that ensued touching on several things I have told, brought back the old time more distinctively, and he said he should often come to recall it by my help, and to learn more of his mother, whose beautiful face haunted his dreams. But just afterwards I left Boston for some years, and did not see him again until after his return from Vienna, where he went after leaving college, and remained till he had completed his medical studies. I promised then to show him his mother's letters to me, written in her girlhood, and to tell him how much the early experience of his own childhood had ministered to her a heavenly consolation. But again inexorable circumstances interfered. He became a practising physician in Worcester, and I went to Concord to live, and we procrastinated a promised visit until at last Death mocked our slow affections. I saw him last wrapped in the flag of his country, for when the war broke out in 1861, nothing would do but he must go to it; and he went as one of the surgeons of the 15th Regiment, which was terribly cut up. For a year and a half he did an incredible amount of work, for he would always have his hospital on the field of battle, and the 15th was in a great many battles, and left but few survivors, most of whom are maimed or halt. He took care of those wounded ones who could not be taken from the battle-field, wrote letters for them, and never took a furlough, as every other officer and surgeon did. In the last letter that he wrote to his father, he said that this year and a half was in one sense the happiest time of his life; for it was the only time when he seemed to be of any use. He was killed at last, walking up through the main street of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the van of the regiment, as was his wont, and his death was instantaneous. His patriotism and his bravery were the fruits of his piety. Every year his father and I met to decorate his grave until his father's death in 1883-4. He is buried at Mt. Auburn by his mother's side, whose body was removed from the tomb in the old burial ground of Cambridge. I have a photograph of him taken at the same age as his mother when she died,—thirty-one years. It was the year before he went to the war, a drooping head, pensive as if marked for early death. But when I saw him dead, his brow was lifted, his whole countenance had become grand and heroic, and it was plain that he had found his ideal vocation. His funeral was celebrated in the city of Worcester with military honors, the wounded soldiers of his regiment following the hearse in carriages, and the sidewalks of the city thronged with the multitude of spectators. A discourse upon the text, "No man can do more than lay down his life for his friends," was pronounced over him at the church, and the beautiful hymn sung, "Nearer my God to Thee," which seemed to me the most appropriate conceivable, though he had never been far from Him, after he knew a name for Him.

After the funeral his father's relatives and friends gathered together, and we talked of him. I told my recollections of his childhood, and all of them expressed the feeling that the life he had led was in perfect harmony with such an early acquaintance made with the Heavenly Father.