Page:The sanity of William Blake.djvu/30

 Rh to the deeps of maternal tenderness that lie sleeping in the darling's soul. It is quite certain to her that her arms are made for rocking this baby rather than for useful sewing. Again, the boy's nursery chairs can be wild horses at any moment. Thus employed, they are surely of saner service than when exacting good behaviour! Child-legs are for dancing, rather than walking; voice for laughing and crying, rather than the multiplication table; mind for asserting power in building or destroying, rather than for the rule of three. The child possibly has some instinctive knowledge of the clouds of glory whence he came; which clouds, if they mean anything, mean that the worth of life is measured rather by the poor child's faculty of inventing a symbol of motherhood than by the millionaire's purchase of human labour and his scientific modes of doing even better without it. The child fights and rebels against the rule of three and the rule of the world, until his imagination, that holy quality without which soul has no life, is broken: until he learns to live by bread alone. The maxim of this third class stands thus: that the whole purpose of education is to teach the hart to desire