Page:Sketch of Connecticut, Forty Years Since.djvu/115

 whom were accustomed to retire to slumber with the birds. Full of pleasure, which seemed more dignified than that usually exemplified in childhood, because it was derived from a higher source, they separated, praising the benevolent Lady, who expressed such an interest in their welfare.

A description of scenes like these will doubtless-be condemned by many, as puerile. They will immediately discern in it proofs of that mental dotage, which leads us, in our second childhood, to cling tenderly to the most minute traces of the first.

They may perhaps inquire, of what consequence is it if the children of another age were amused and improved at the same time? Probably of none, to those who are willing theirs should find amusement, at the expense of improvement. But it was deemed of some importance, in pourtraying a character which really existed, to represent things as they were. It was not thought improper to follow the smaller streams, which might diverge from so pure a fountain. The science of conferring happiness depends less upon splendid achievements, and fortuitous combinations of circumstance, than upon those smaller occurrences, which vary the common lot of existence: as the evidence of piety, is not so much in sustaining great affliction, as in surmounting those slighter perplexities, where, if we may use the expression, the soul imagines herself to be out of sight of the Deity. Yet might this simple delineation, of what one of the best of human beings was, in the humbler walks of her benevolence, in-