Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 129.djvu/133

Rh  been discovered for more than a century, yet a book was still regarded as a sacred object, as may be gathered from the bindings of that time; and hence it came that the high-minded poet regarded it as something dear and venerable; but bur books are merely stitched together, and we are rarely conscious of respect for either cover or contents.

The most foolish of all mistakes consists in young men of sound talents fearing to lose their originality by acknowledging truths which have already been recognized by others.

Scholars have usually an invidious manner of refuting others; an error in their eyes assuming at once the proportions of a crime.

It is impossible that beauty should ever distinctly apprehend itself.

No sooner had subjective, or so-called sentimental poetry been placed on a level with poetry of an objective and realistic tendency, a consummation not to be avoided unless we choose to condemn all modern poetry, than it was to be expected that, even in the case of the advent of men of true poetical genius, they would thenceforth prefer depicting the intimate experiences of the inner life to that of the great and busy world around them. And this method now prevails to such an extent that we actually possess a poetry without tropes, to which one must concede, however, certain merits of its own.

 

 From The Saturday Review.

things, once the possession of humanity, have been lost to the world forever — books, arts, and even lands; but we are in danger now of losing something more valuable than any of these — namely, the childhood of our children, the maidenliness of our maidens. Where are the children, as we knew them in days gone by, when simplicity and innocence were part of their charter, and to be a child meant to be fresh, unspoiled, and free from the taint of dangerous knowledge? Gone with the dream of the things that were and are not. They are not to be found in the precocious fledglings dragged about the Continent on autumn tours, or sitting at tables d'hôte with the governess at Nice while the father and mother are killing time and something more at Monaco. They are not among the miniature men and women who honour us with their presence when we give a juvenile entertainment, who come to criticise our Christmas-tree, which they seldom find good enough to praise, to pronounce our dance a bore, and our supper a sell; not among those unhappy little ones whom fond parents dress up in picturesque costumes for fancy balls, teaching them a self-complacency, a self-consideration far beyond their years, and only too easily learnt; and least of all are they among those still more unhappy little ones who act plays for the amusement of a grave and grown-up audience, and are stimulated by applause and excitement into a state of moral intoxication wherein all that makes youth lovely is lost forever. For the cleverer they are for their years, the more disastrously their talent works on their natures; and one of the saddest sights known to us is that of a bright, pretty, vivacious little girl acting her saucy part with aplomb and assurance, failing in all that makes childhood most lovely just in proportion as she succeeds in her attempt to be some one else than herself.

By the very nature of things it is difficult for the children of the London fashionable world to preserve their innocence and childishness, victims as they are, now by association and now by exclusion, to the fast social life of their parents. From their cradles they are subjected to the closest intercourse with nurses highly recommended by ladies anxious to get rid of them, and whose relations are to be found mainly in doubtful circumstances and shady quarters. Admitted to the questionable gossip of the monthly nurse when she enters the nursery circle on authorized occasions, and to the continued confidences of the resident nurses, who perhaps are gross through ignorance rather than through vice, the children are reared from the beginning under the shadow of the tree of knowledge, and are made free of the blossoms before their time comes to eat of the fruit. But if the nurses are not the wisest or best rearers of our children, fine-lady mothers are not much better; and the dressed-up dolls whose velvet and point-lace are shown off to visitors in the drawing-room not unfrequently hear there more than is good for them of what, if they do not understand it to its fullest extent now, they think of hereafter and meditate on till they have found out the riddle. One kind of fine-lady mother certainly leaves her children to be brought up by nurses without much assistance from her even for the show-hour in the 