Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/117

 same individual, in childhood, than it is at an adult age. The want of culture, or the long continued pressure of necessity, or the indulgence of sensual propensities, often obliterates the intellectuality and the moral sensitiveness which had belonged to the child, so that the man at thirty is, in a philosophic sense, much less remote from the brute, than he had been at four or five. The vivid pleasure derived by children from the objects that surround them, instead of indicating the prevalence of the animal part of our nature, is directly a proof of the vivacity and supremacy of its intellectual elements. A child’s happiness is the happiness of the SOUL, much more than of the body;his joys, instead of staying in the sense, go through and through him; and just as a babe of three months old smiles all over, when it smiles at all, and kicks with merriment, so does a child enjoy what he enjoys, with a throb of his every faculty.

I must return for a moment to the subject of graphic instruction, as peculiarly adapted to promote the objects of early education. Far more use might be made of this means of quickening the mind than is often attempted; and let me be allowed to remind young mothers (and young ladies) that, in practical value, the ability to sketch rapidly, in a characteristic manner, all sorts of common objects, vastly outweighs some four or five of those accomplishments to which years are devoted in youth, and which are usually laid aside, and lost, when the duties of domestic life are entered upon. Prints, it is true, may be purchased; but beside many objections to which they are liable, and their cost, if provided in sufficient number and variety, it is found that a fresh sketch, adapted to the occasion, and suited to a child’s age and taste, imparts more pleasure, and subserves better the ends intended.

A mother, qualified to use her pencil in this manner, may, without labour, bring all the most familiar and the most