Years pass on. The college boy returns with more knowledge of horses, wine and women, than of Greek, Latin and mathematics—returns to receive the congratulations of partial friends that he has passed off for pure gold the glittering brass of his showy superficiality. The truant's name is never mentioned, or if so, with the hope, not that he may be kept from evil, but "that he may not disgrace us." Meanwhile the wanderer lies languishing on a bed of sickness in a foreign country. Woman's heart is the same in all lands, when pity knocks at it, else had he closed his eyes in exile. Pity he had not—pity he returned to be asked, with cold tones and averted eyes, why he did not stay there. Pity that he could not smother that unconquerable longing which approaching death brings, to look our last upon our native land. Pity that the errors born of neglected childhood, and forsaken youth, should have been held up to him by the pharisaical hands which goaded him into them, even at the tomb's portal. Pity that sinful man may not be merciful as a holy, pitying God.
I ask you, and you, and you, who have woven the "coat of many colors" for some one of your household—you who, by your partiality and short-sightedness, are fostering the rank weeds, and trampling under foot the humble flowers—you who are bringing up children whose hearts shall one day be colder to each other than the dead in their graves—you upon whom shall be visited—alas! too late—every scalding tear of agony and disappointment from out young eyes, which should have beamed only with hope and gladness;—I ask every parent who is doing this, if he or she is willing that his or her child shall grow up by these means to lose his faith in man, and sadder still, in God?
I wonder is it foreordained that there shall be one child in every family whom "nobody can do anything with?" Who tears around the paternal pasture with its heels in the air, looking at rules, as a colt does at fences, as good things to jump over. We all know that the poor thing must be "broken in," and all its graceful curvetings sobered down to a monotonous jog-trot; that it must be taught to bear heavy burdens, and to toil up many a steep ascent at the touch of the spur; but who that has climbed the weary height does not pass the halter round the neck of the pretty creature with a half-sigh, that its happy day of careless freedom should be soon ended?
How it bounds away from you, making you almost glad that your attempt was a failure; how lovingly your eye follows it, as it makes the swift breathless circle, and stops at a safe distance to nod you defiance. Something of all this every loving parent has felt, while trying to reduce to order the child whom "nobody can do anything with."
Geography, grammar and history seem to be put into one ear, only to go out at the other. The multiplication table might as well be written in Arabic, for any idea it conveys, or lodges, if conveyed, in the poor thing's head. Temperate, torrid, and frigid zones may all be of a temperature, for all she can remember, and her mother might have been present at the creation of the world, or at the birth of the Author of it, for aught she can chronologically be brought to see.
But look! she is tired of play, and has taken up her pencil to draw; she has had no instruction; but peep over her shoulder and follow her pencil; there is the true artist touch in that little sketch, though she does not know it—a freedom, a boldness which teaching may regulate, never impart. Now she is tired of drawing, and takes up a volume of poems, far beyond the comprehension, one would think, of a child of her years, and though she often miscalls a word, and knows little and cares less about commas and semi-colons, yet not the finest touch of humor or pathos escapes her, and the poet would be lucky, were he always sure of so appreciative a reader. She might tell you that France was bounded south by the Gulf of Mexico, but you yourself could not criticise Dickens or Thackeray with more discrimination.
Down goes the book, and she is on the tips of her toes pirouetting. She has never seen a dancing-school, nor need she; perfectly modeled machinery cannot but move harmoniously; she does not know, as she floats about, that she is an animated poem. Now she is tired of dancing, and she throws herself into an old arm-chair, in an attitude an artist might copy, and commences to sing; she is ignorant of quavers, crotchets and semi-breves, of tenors, baritones and sopranos, and yet you, who have heard them with rapturous encores, stop to listen to her simple melody.
Now she is down in the kitchen playing cook; she turns a beef-steak as if she had been brought up in a restaurant, and washes dishes for fun, as if it had been always sober earnest; singing, dancing and drawing the cook's portrait at intervals, and all equally well done.
Now send that child to any school in the land, where "Moral Science" is hammered remorselessly and uselessly into curly heads, and she would be pronounced an incorrigible dunce. Idiotically stupid parrot-girls would ride over her shrinking, sensitive shame-facedness, rough-shod. She would be kept after school, kept in during recess, and have a discouraging list of bad recitation marks as long as Long Island; get a crooked spine, grow ashamed of throwing snow-balls, have a chronic headache, and an incurable disgust of teachers and schools, as well she might.