MY DEAR GODEY:—
I have not finished my gossip about children. I have a good deal yet to say touching their sensibilities, their nice discriminating sense, and the treatment which they too frequently receive from those who, although older than themselves, are in very many things not half so wise.
If you will take up Southey's Autobiography, written by himself (and his son), and recently published by my friends, the brothers Harper, you will find in the portion of Southey's early history, as recorded by himself, many striking examples of the keen susceptibility of childhood to outward and inward impressions, and of the deep feeling which underlies the apparently unthoughtful career of a young boy. It is a delightful opening of his whole heart to his reader. One sees with him the smallest object of nature about the home of his childhood; and it is impossible not to enter into all his feelings of little joys and poignant sorrows. I am not without the hope, therefore, that, in the few records which I am about to give you; partly of personal experience and partly of personal observation, I shall be able to enlist the attention of your readers; for, after all, each one of us, friend Godey, in our own more mature joys and sorrows, is but an epitome, so to speak, the great mass, who alike rejoice and grieve us.
I do not wish to exhibit anything like a spirit of egotism, and I assure you that I write with a gratified feeling that is a very wide remove from that selfish sentiment, when I tell you that I have received from very many parents, in different parts of the country, letters containing their "warm and grateful thanks" for the endeavor which I made, in a recent number of your magazine, to create more confidence in childhood and youth; to awaken, along with a "sense of duty"—that too frequent excuse for domestic tyranny—a feeling of generous forbearance for the trivial, venial faults of those whose hearts are just and tender, and whom "kindness wins when cruelty would repel." You must let me go on in my own way, and I will try to illustrate the truth and justice of my position.
I must go back to my very earliest schooldays. I doubt if I was more than five years old, a little boy in the country, when I was sent, with my twin-brother, to a summer "district school." It was kept by a "school-ma'am," a pleasant young woman of some twenty years of age. She was positively my first love. I am afraid I was an awkward scholar at first; but the enticing manner in which Mary —— (I grieve that only the faint sound of her unsyllabled name comes to me now from "the dark backward and abysm of Time") coaxed me through the alphabet and the words of one syllable; encouraged me to encounter those of two (the first of which I remember to this day, whenever the baker's bill for my children's daily bread is presented for audit); stimulated me to attack those of three; until, at the last, I was enabled to surmount that tallest of orthoëpical combinations, "Mi-chi-li-mack-i-nack", without a particle of fear; the enticing manner, I say, in which Mary —— accomplished all this, won my heart. She would stoop over and kiss me, on my low seat, when I was successful, and very pleasant were her "good words" to my ear. Bless your heart! I remember at this moment the feeling of her soft brown curls upon my cheek; and I would give almost anything now to see the first "certificate" of good conduct which I brought home, in her handwriting, to my mother, and which was kept for years among fans, bits of dried orange-peel, and sprigs of withered "caraway," in a corner of the bureau-"draw." All this came very vividly to me some time ago, when my own little boy brought home his first "school-ticket." He is not called, however—and I rejoice that he is not—to remember dear companions, who "bewept to the grave did go, with true-love showers."
"Oh, my mother! oh, my childhood!
Oh, my brother, now no more!
Oh, the years that push me onward,
Farther from that distant shore!"
But I am led away. I wanted merely to say that this "school-ma'am," from the simple love of her children, her little scholars, knew how to teach and how to rule them. I hope that not a few "school-ma'ams" will peruse this hastily-prepared gossip; and if they do, I trust they will remember, in the treatment of their little charges, that "the heart must leap kindly back to kindness." Why, my dear sir, I used to wait, in the summer afternoons, until all the little pupils had gone on before, so that I could place in the soft white hand of my school-mistress as confiding a little hand as any in which she may afterwards have placed her own, "in the full trust of love." I hope she found a husband good and true, and that she was blessed with what she loved, "wisely" and not "too well," children.
Now that I am on the subject of children at school, I wish to pursue the theme at a little greater length, and give you an incident or two in my farther experience.