Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 126.djvu/351

Rh endless "classes," and masters for every accomplishment under the sun. Even the imagination is better cultivated in loneliness, when the child, through its solitary rambles by wood and shore, spins its gossamer webs of fancy, and invents tales of heroism and wonder such as no melodrama or pantomime ever yet brought to the town child's exhausted brain. Then the affections of the country child are concentrated on their few objects with a passionate warmth of which the feelings of the town child, dissipated amid scores of friends and admirers, afford no measure whatever. The admiration amounting to worship paid by many a little lonely girl to some older woman who represents to her all of grace and goodness she has yet dreamed, and who descends every now and then from some far-off Elysium to be a guest in her home, is one of the least read and yet surely one of the prettiest chapters of innocent human sentiment. As to the graver and more durable affections nourished in the old home, the fond attachment of brothers and sisters; the reverence for the father, the love — purest and deepest of all earthly loves — of mother for child and child for mother, — there can be little doubt that their growth in the calm, sweet country life must be healthier and deeper-rooted than it can well be elsewhere.

And finally, almost certainly, such a peaceful and solitary youth soon enters the deeper waters of the moral and spiritual life, and breathes religious aspirations which have in them, in those early years, the freshness and the holiness of the morning. Happy and good must, indeed, be that later life from whose heights any man or woman can dare to look back on one of those lonely childhoods, without a covering of the face. Talk of hermitages or monasteries! The real nursery of religion is one of these old English homes, where every duty is natural, easy, beautiful; where the pleasures are so calm, so innocent, so interwoven with the duties that the one need scarcely be defined from the other; and where the spectacle of nature's loveliness is forever suggesting the thought of Him who built the blue dome of heaven, and scattered over all the ground His love-tokens of flowers. The happy child dwelling in such a home with a father and mother, who speak to it sometimes of God and the life to come, but do not attempt to intrude into that Holy of Holies, a young soul's love and penitence and resolution, is the place on earth, perhaps, best fitted to nourish the flame of religion. Of the cruelty and wickedness and meanness of the world the child hears only as she learns in her school-books of the wild beasts or poisonous reptiles who may roam or crawl in African deserts. They are too far off to force themselves on her attention as dreadful problems of the Sphinx to be solved on pain of moral death. Even of sickness, poverty, and death, she thinks oftenest as occasions for the kindly and helpful sympathy of her parents and guides.

To turn to lighter matters. Of course among the first recognized pleasures of the country is the constant intercourse with, or rather bathing in, nature. We are up to the lips in the ocean of fresh air, grass, and trees. It is not one beautiful object, or another, which attracts us (as sometimes happens in town), but, without being interrupted by thinking of them individually, they influence us en masse. Dame Nature has taken us on her lap, and soothes us with her own lullaby. Probably, on the whole, country folks admire each separate view and scrap of landscape less than their visitors from the town, and criticise it as little as schoolboys do their mother's dress. But they love nature as a whole, and her real influence appears in their genial characters, their healthy nervous systems, and their optimist opinions. Nor is it by any means only inanimate nature wherewith they are concerned. Not to speak of their poorer neighbours (of whom they know much more, and with whom they usually live in far more kindly relations than townsfolk with theirs), they have incessant concern with brutes and birds. How much, to some of us, the leisurely watching of stately cattle, gentle sheep, and playful lambs, the riding and driving of generous, kindly-natured horses, and the companionship of loving dogs, adds to the sum of the day's pleasures, and tunes the mind to its happiest keynote, it would be difficult to define. For my own part, I have never ceased to wonder how Christian divines have been able to picture heaven, and leave it wholly unpeopled by animals. Even for their own sakes (not to speak of justice to the oft ill-treated brutes), would they not have desired to give their humble companions some little corner in their boundless sky? A place with perpetual music going on, and not a single animal to caress — even those which Mahomet promised his followers, — his own camel, Balaam's ass,