It is the impatient people, the young people, the childish people, in a rude and restless childhood. If they cannot be doing in creating, they will be doing by destroying.
But what they most fatally injure is—themselves! A violent education, stormily impassioned in love or severity, crushes in the child, withers, chokes up the first moral flower of natural sensitiveness, all that was purest of the maternal milk, the germ of universal love which rarely blooms again.
Among too many children we are saddened by their almost incredible sterility. A few recover from it in the long circle of life, when they have become experienced and enlightened men. But the first freshness of the heart? It shall return no more.[29]
How is it that this nation, otherwise born under such felicitous circumstances, is, with rare and local exceptions, accursed with so singular an incapacity for harmony? It has its own peculiar songs, its charming little melodies of vivacity and mirth. But it needs a prolonged effort, a special education, to attain to harmony.
Page [158]. Flattening of the brain.—The weight of the brain, compared with that of the body, is, in the
(Estimate of Haller and Leuret.)
Page [158]. The noble falcon.—The noble birds (the falcon, gerfalcon, saker) are those which hold their prey by the talon, and kill it with the bill: their bill, for this purpose, is toothed. The ignoble birds (the eagle, the kite, &c.) are for the most part swift of flight (voiliers): these employ their talons to rend and choke their victims. The rameurs rise with difficulty, which enables the voiliers to escape them the more easily. The tactics of the former are to feign, in the first place, to rise to a great height; and then, by suffering themselves to drop, they disconcert the manœuvres of the voiliers. (Huber, Vol des Oiseaux de Proie, 1784, 4to. He was the first of that clever lineage, Huber of the birds, Huber of the bees, Huber of the ants.)