Well, I believe I could preach a long, useful and pleasant health sermon from the very lines I have quoted. This is not quite my intention, however. But nevertheless I like to see a volume of poetry in a girl’s hand, and some of our older poets really teach us many a lesson, and these alas! are far too much neglected. Fashions, even in poetry, change as well as in music. Give me simplicity in both, and keep your Browning and your Wagner too. Many a lady in society pretends to love both, who knows nothing about either.
But, taking Gray as an example of a true and simple poet, whose lines you can read without racking your brain in wondering what the poet means, is there not, think you, a deal of truth in the verse that heads this paper?
From work many a girl wins light spirits. Work I mean, not the slavery which, alas! is far too often the lot of poor shop lassies and seamstresses, for whom my heart does bleed. Work versus sauntering idleness. This idleness means an open empty mind; and parents may rest assured that, as Nature abhors a vacuum, girls are not very old before they get such minds filled with thoughts and silly aspirations that tend neither to the development of a healthy body nor a wholesome mind. Young girls who have nothing to do build themselves castles in the air and people them with inmates that they themselves are heartily ashamed of.
Indeed, I do not know anything more likely to generate future unhappiness and crabbed ill-health than graduation in the school of idleness.
An idle body preys upon itself and eke an idle mind.
I may be told that it is fashionable to be idle. True, in certain ranks of life, but here is my answer to that. Nature not only hates a vacuum, but she is fond of evenness of surface both as regards the material world and as regards the immaterial. Nature even levels the mountains, or is gradually doing so, and fashion is a tool of hers. Fashion levels down, education and honest work level up; and, in time, Nature will thus see to it that both shall meet.
It was, I think, Bulwer Lytton—one of the heroes of my boyhood—who proposed an “Aristocracy of Letters.” The notion has not yet borne fruit, and the aristocracy we have is certainly not very dignified, it being constantly added to and adulterated by parvenus of the lowest type, namely, men who have made millions dishonestly, such as quacks and patent nostrum men. So, in the course of a few decades, we shall have little reason to be proud of our “upper ten.” But a true and pure aristocracy may yet arise in this country from the ashes of the fading and effete present. Nothing but wisdom, knowledge and health can support this.
Well, every mater who wishes her girls to grow up happy and healthy, as they ought to be, has much to do and much to think about.
It cannot be too strongly impressed upon a mother’s mind that the first portion of a child’s education is begun in the nursery. Children are imitative to a degree, as much so as the monkeys from which, some say, we are evoluted. One cannot be too careful then with the ethical management of the nursery.
Servants allowed to enter there, or maids who take a child out in its little carriage, should be morally and physically pure. Even baby may learn from a nurse things that will never be forgotten. When she gets a little older she may be corrected, and told that to say this or do that is rude or naughty, and she will refrain for fear of punishment—that is all. The seed is sown, and nothing can eradicate the mischief.