Page:Home Education by Isaac Taylor (1838).djvu/43

 things, and turn the scale so that the ideal expansions of pleasure and pain come to be nearly equal. During child-hood, while the power to enlarge sufferings, by reflection, advances very slowly, and is scarcely more in the tenth year than it was in the third, the propensity and the power to expand enjoyments beyond the limit of animal gratification are continually increasing. Thus for example, a child of three years old creates for itself, from a stick, a stone, or a straw, a long continued and tranquil delight; but a boy of ten or twelve, with materials quite as meagre in proportion to the pleasure drawn from them, though of a rather different sort, such as, a score or two of tiles, and a bundle of sticks; or a hammer, a gimlet, and nails, will furnish for himself an intensity of happiness, and to which he will eagerly return, day after day, spending hours in an employment which derives ninety-nine parts out of the hundred of its power of fascination from what the mind adds to the tangible material of its pleasures. Such instances might be compared to those manufactures in which pennyworth of iron, or of cotton, is, by the skill bestowed upon it, so enhanced in value as to be worth a guinea.

It is not often before the seventeenth or eighteenth year that the balance begins to turn, and that the mind, revolving more upon itself, recollecting more, anticipating more, as it actually knows more, acquires the habit of expanding its pains in a proportion nearly as great as that in which it expands its pleasures. It is then that the high pitch of boyish joyousness is lowered, never again to stand steadily so high: and it is then that the deeper emotions and energies of the soul are brought into play, by the stress of disquieting reflections.

But childhood has few regrets, and still fewer anticipations, nor any of an anxious sort; nor does its open eye ever turn from the bright objects of the world around it, to penetrate the mists that shroud the future. The frivolous