Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 095.djvu/304

Rh Such experience to forestal is a dreary doom, whose blackness of darkness can be pierced only by the faith that looks through death, in years that bring the philosophic mind. Aunt Reeds flourish and multiply exceedingly in this work-a-day world; but what have they in common with the poetry and sanctity ox life's matin-hours? They can gaze on a sleeping child as Peter Hell gazed on a yellow cowslip; nor to them will it ever occur, that even now within that baby-brow are lighted truths that wake to perish never; or that, as Wilson sweetly sings.It has been said of Man in general, that he is greater than he thinks. Of children we may add, they are greater than they are thought. The germ of the good, the beautiful, and the true, is swelling within those tiny bosoms; the light is shining, though through a glass darkly, and though. A contemporary autobiographer, whose days are in the sere and yellow leaf, records how vividly there still lingers in his ears, from the time of infancy, the opening of Mrs. Barbauld's prose hymn—where some solitary infant is enticed into some solitary garden, with the words, "Come, and I will show you what is beautiful." This trifle, this shred of a fragment—for it is all he remembers—still echoes, he declares, with luxurious sweetness in his ears, from some unaccountable hide-and-seek of fugitive childish memories. Great is the mystery of childhood; and correspondingly mournful is its violation by coarse hands—the cutting of its Gordian knot by impatient worldliness. These thoughts are aroused, and kindred ones suggested, by the moving passages—so many daguerreotypic miniatures—of "Jane Eyre's" earliest years. Something abnormal and isolated there may be in her temperament, but the portrait is, after all, made up of touches of nature that make us all akin. Mark how the child's poetry will expatiate somewhere, will soar somewhither, will develop itself somehow, will glorify and idealise something: checked and stunted as it is—cabined, cribbed, confined, by household tyranny and killing coldness—still it must fasten upon some object, and that object (in default of a better) is the coarse and petulant Bessie, the house-drudge. who is so often pushing Jane about, and scolding her without cause, and whose temper is as hasty and capricious as her notions of principle and justice are lax; but sometimes Bessie is gentle, and speaks softly (an excellent thing in woman) to the ill-favoured orphan, and then, when thus gentle, Bessie seemed to me," she says, "the best, prettiest, kindest being in the world."

Or again, take Jane's comfort in her doll. Justly it has been averred that a great psychologic truth is contained in that simple sentence, "I was happy, believing it to be happy likewise." Here, in the inanimate toy, the child's poetical instinct found scope for exercise, and her spiritual nature sustenance and solacement. That o'erfraught heart must, if it would not break, whisper its secrets to a cross nursery-maid, and wind its tendrils around a bruised and battered doll. Nobly has childhood been apostrophised as—