Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/39

 the season of spontaneous felicity. Every one must be aware of this fact; and yet the consideration of it enters far less than it should into our plans of domestic management.

The natural felicity of childhood might in truth be assumed as the guiding principle of all education; and most especially so of that which is carried on at home; nor can we well attribute too much importance to the knowledge and recollection of it, as the rule and reason, the means and the end, of almost every thing that is attempted in carrying the domestic system into effect. Warm-hearted parents (or at least the mother) may perhaps almost resent the officiousness of a writer, who, as she will think, with superfluous zeal, would go about to induce her to pay more regard than hitherto she has done, to tle happiness of her children; or who, with such a purpose in view, should endearour to point out that peculiar constitution of the infant mind, by which its felicity is se- cured, so far as it can be, by general laws. I am nevertheless inclined to incur this risk; and moreover to lay myself open to the clarge of insisting upon what "every body understands," while I dwell a little upon a subject inseparable from the task I have undertaken, and mainly connected with every part of the system of culture hereinafter to be spoken of.

Adults look for external means of enjoyment, and seek happiness in the gratification of specific wishes or desires; but an infant -- simply protected from positive suffering, is happy from the stock of its own resources, and by the perpetual gush of joyous emotions, having no determinate direction as they burst abroad, like rills from a hill top, and which sparkle and dance as they glide away. Every one who is not too fastidious, or too supercilious, to give attention to facts of this sort, mut have admired the pertinacity of nature if we might so speak) in securing