There are natures sent down into this harsh world so timorous, sensitive, and helpless in themselves, that the utmost stretch of indulgence and kindness is needed for their development,—like plants which the warmest shelf of the green-house and the most watchful care of the gardener alone can bring into flower.
Child’s reasoning.
“It’s curious what notions chil’en will get in their heads,” said Captain Kittridge. “They put this an’ that together and think it over, an’ come out with such queer things.”
THE CHIMNEY CORNER.
A child’s love.
The hearts of little children are easily gained, and their love is real and warm, and no true woman can become the object of it without feeling her own life made brighter.
THE MAYFLOWER.
A child’s longing for sympathy.
But the feelings of grown-up children exist in the minds of little ones oftener than is supposed; and I had, even at this early day, the same keen sense of all that touched the heart wrong; the same longing for something which should touch it aright; the same discontent with latent, matter-of-course affection, and the same craving for sympathy, which has been the unprofitable fashion of this world in all ages. And no human being possessing such constitutionals has a better chance of being made unhappy by them than the backward, uninteresting, wrong-doing child. We can all sympathize, to some extent, with men and women; but how few can go back to the sympathies of childhood; can understand the desolate insignificance of not being one of the grown-up people; of being sent to bed, to be out of the way in the evening, and to school, to be out of the way in the morning; of manifold similar grievances and distresses, which the child has no elocution to set forth, and the grown person no imagination to conceive.