She sees her little bud put forth its leaves—
What may the fruits be yet?—I know not—Cain was Eve’s.”
The fallen young mother in Mrs. Gaskell’s story hails in her child a new, pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagines, in the early passion of maternal love, she can guard from every touch of corrupting sin by ever watchful and most tender care. “And her mother had thought the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians for their little children.”
Juvenal asks, “what morn’s so holy but its sun betrays theft, perfidy, and fraud.” The thief, the betrayer, the cheat, was once a child. Ovid urges the dissimilitude between such a man and such a child: dissimiles hic vir, et ille puer. The Abbé Delille expatiates on the attractions of each Spring-tide, and, by affinity, of each new-born Day, as consisting in its refreshing redolence of promise—“qui ne nous fait que des promesses.” Fraught with feeling in every line is the following sonnet addressed by the late Baron Alderson to one of his children on her second birthday:
“Sweet is the fragrance of the morning hour,
Sweet is the sun’s first radiance, sweet the year,
In the spring’s early promise, sweet the flower,
Seen in its buds, ere yet its leaves appear—
But sweeter far, my angel babe, to me
Is that blue eye that speaks thy opening mind,