“Sometimes you tremble when you are angry,” said another; “and you usually talk very fast,” added a third. The discussion which followed was interesting and helpful. They were astonished at the reports made by physicians and students of the effect upon digestion of angry words, or sullen silence, during dinner. They learned in a new way the value of the temper controlled, and of self-mastery in all lines. They were interested enough to bring into class instances of self-control under trying circumstances, and of calamities following complete loss of control for only a few minutes. I think they realized in a new way the majesty of the perfect self-control of Christ in the most trying moments of his life. We talked over with profit the effect upon the physical life, of hurry, of fear, of worry and useless anxiety, and have tried to find why the Christ was free from them all. The conclusions reached by the girls themselves have been helpful in every instance.
As long as we live, the physical will be with us; it is not to be despised, but respected; not to be ignored, but developed; not to be abused, but used. It demands obedience, and exacts penalty when its laws are broken. It is so complicated that no one can understand it. We may study and analyze, but how much of the physical is mental, and how much of the spiritual is physical, no one to-day is able to say. Of this we may be sure,—the physical side of the girl in her teens is a tremendous force that must be reckoned with, and demands for its fullest development and her future well being all the sympathy, patience, and wisdom that parents and teachers can supply.
CHAPTER III—THE MENTAL SIDE
The girl in her teens does think. She has been called careless, thoughtless, inattentive and a day-dreamer. Though these things are often true of her, she is on the whole a thinker. Her day-dreams are thoughtful. In building her air castles she uses memory and imagination, and sometimes one wonders if these factors to which we owe so much do not get as valuable training from “dreams” as from algebra. Certain it is that many women who have helped make the world a more comfortable place in which to live laid plans for their future work on sweet spring days, or long autumn afternoons when Latin grammar faded away in the distance, and things vital, near, and real came to take its place.
When Lucy Larcom stood by the noisy loom in the rush and whirl of the big factory, day-dreaming while her busy hands fulfilled their task, memory and imagination were being trained, and one morning the world read the day-dream. At first it was a picture of flowers and fields and cloudless skies, then it came back to the tenements on the narrow streets and said:
“If I were a sunbeam,
I know where I’d go,
Into lowliest hovels,
Dark with want and woe.
Till sad hearts looked upward,
I would shine and shine.
Then they’d think of heaven,
Their sweet home and mine.”
This and many another gem the imagination of the factory girl wrought out beside the loom.
The day-dreams, the “castles” reared by the imagination of girlhood, must find expression, and they do—in diaries, “literary productions” and poems at which we sometimes smile.