ANECDOTES OF CHILDREN. 209 whose fruitage is angels and archangels. Or dewdrops! They are dewdrops that have their source, not in the chambers of the earth, nor among the vapors of the sky, which the next breath of wind, or the next flash of sunshine, may dry up forever, but among the everlasting fountains and inexhaustible reservoirs of mercy and love. Playthings! If the little creatures would but appear to us in their true shape for a moment, we should fall upon our faces before them, or grow pale with consternation, or fling them off with horror. 7. What would be our feelings, to see a fair child start up before us a manaic, or a murderer, armed to the teeth? to find a nest of serpents on our pillow? a destroyer or a traitor, a Harry the Eighth, or a Benedict Arnold, asleep in our bosom? A Catharine or a Peter, a Bacon, a Galileo, or a Bentham, a Napoleon, or a Voltaire, clambering up our knees after sugar-plumbs? Cuvier, laboring to distinguish a horse-fly from a blue-bottle, or dissecting a spider with a rusty nail? La Place trying to multiply his own apples, or to subtract his play-fellow's gingerbread? What should we say, to find ourselves romping with Messalina, Swedenborg, and Madame de Staël? or playing bo-peep with Marat, Robespierre, and Charlotte Corday, or "puss puss in the corner," with George Washington, Jonathan Wild, Shakspeare, Sappho, Jeremy Taylor, Mrs. Clark, or Alfieri? 8. Yet stranger things have happened. These were all children but the other day, and clambered about the knees, and rummaged in the pockets, and nestled in the laps, of people no better than we are. But, if they could have appeared in their true shape for a single moment, while they were playing together, what a scampering there would have been among the grown folks! how their fingers would have tingled! LESSON C. Anecdotes of Children. 1. I REMEMBER a little boy who was a lexicographer from his birth, a language-master, and a philosopher. From the hour he was able to ask for a piece of bread and butter, he never hesitated for a word, not he! If one would not serve, another would, with a little twisting and turning. He assured me one day, when I was holding him by the hand rather tighter than he wished (he was but just able to speak at the time), that I should choke his hand; at another, he came to me, all out of breath, to announce, that a man was below shaving the wall. Upon due inquiry, it turned out that he was only white-washing. But how should he know the difference between white-wash and lather, a big brush and a little one? Show me, if you can, a prettier example of synthesis or generalization, or a more beautiful adaptation of old words to new purposes. 2. I have heard another complain of a school-fellow for winking at him with his lip; and he took the affront very much to heart, I assure you, and would not be pacified till the matter was cleared up. Other children talk about the bones in peaches, - osteologists are they; and others, when they have the toothache, aver that it burns them. Of such is the empire of poetry. I have heard another give a public challenge in these words, to every child that came near, as she sat upon the door-step, with a pile of tamarind-stones, nut-shells, and pebbles lying before her. "Ah! I 've got many-er than you!" That child was a better grammarian than Lindley Murray. And her wealth, in what was it unlike the hoarded and useless wealth of millions? 3. Never shall I forget another incident which occurred in my presence between two other boys. One was trying to jump over a wheel-barrow. Another was going by; he stopped, and after considering a moment, spoke. "I'll tell you what you can't do," said he. "Well, what is it?". "You can't jump down your own throat." "Well, you can't." "Can't I though?" The simplicity of "Well, you can't," and the roguishness of "Can't I though?" tickled me prodigiously. They reminded me of sparring I had seen elsewhere, - I should not like to say where, having a great respect for the temples of justice and the halls of legislation. 4. "I say 't is white-oak." "I say it 's red-oak." "Well, I say it 's white-oak!" "I tell ye 't aint white-oak." Here they had joined issue for the first time. " I say 't is." "I say 't aint." "I 'll bet you ten thousand dollars of it." "Well, I 'll bet you ten ten thousand dollars." Such were the very words of a conversation I have just heard between two chil ANECDOTES OF CHILDREN. 211 dren, the elder six, the other about five. Were not these miniature men? Stockbrokers and theologians? 5. "Well, my lad, you 've been to meeting, hey?" "Yes Sir." "And who preached for you?" "Mr. P." "Ah! and what did he say?" "I can't remember, Sir, he put me out so." "Put you out?" "Yes Sir, - he kept lookin' at my new clothes all meetin' time!" That child must have been a close observer. Will any body tell me, that he did not know what some people go to meeting for? 6. It was but yesterday that I passed a fat little girl, with large hazel eyes, sitting by herself in a gateway, with her feet stretching straight out into the street. She was holding a book in one hand, and with a bit of stick, in the other, was pointing to the letters. "What's that?" cried she, in a sweet, chirping voice, "hey; look on! What 's that, I say? F. No-o-o-oh!" shaking her little head with the air of a school-mistress, who has made up her mind not to be trifled with. 7. But children have other characters. At times they are creatures to be afraid of. Every case I give is a fact within my own observation. There are children, and I have had to do with them, whose very eyes were terrible; children, who after years of watchful and anxious discipline, were as indomitable as the young of the wild beast, dropped in the wilderness, crafty and treacherous and cruel. And others I have known, who, if they live, must have dominion over the multitude, being evidently of them that from the foundations of the world have been always thundering at the gates of power. 8. Parents! Fathers! Mothers! if it be true, that "just as the twig is bent, the tree 's inclined," how much have you to answer for! If" men are but children of a larger growth," watch your children forever, by day and by night! pray for them forever, by night and by day! and not as children, but as men of a smaller growth; as men with most of the evil passions, and with all the evil propensities, that go to make man terrible to his fellow-men. LESSON CI. Early Display of Genius. 1. MANY striking instances have occurred, of the capacity and vigor of the human mind, even amidst the obscurities and the obstructions to mental activity which exist in the present state of things. The illustrious Pascal, no less celebrated for his piety than for his intellectual acquirements, when under the age of twelve years, and while immersed in the study of languages, without books and without an instructor, discovered and demonstrated most of the propositions in the first book of Euclid, before he knew that such a book was in existence, - to the astonishment of every mathematician; so that, at that early age, he was an inventor of geometrical science. 2. He afterwards made some experiments and discoveries on the nature of sound, and on the weight of the air, and demonstrated the pressure of the atmosphere; and at the age of sixteen, composed a treatise on Conic Sections, which, in the judgment of men of the greatest abilities, was an astonishing effort of the human mind. At nineteen years of age, he invented an arithmetical machine, by which calculations are made, not only without the help of a pen, but even without a person's knowing a single rule in arithmetic; and, at the age of twenty-four, he had acquired a proficiency in almost every branch of human knowledge, when his mind became entirely absorbed in the exercises of religion. 3. The celebrated Grotius, at the age of thirteen, only a year after his arrival at the university of Leyden, maintained public theses in mathematics, philosophy, and law, with universal applause. At the age of fourteen, he ventured to form literary plans which required an amazing extent of knowledge; and he executed them in such perfection, that the literary world was struck with astonishment. At this early age, he published an edition of Martianus Capella, and acquitted himself of the task in a manner which would have done honor to the greatest scholars of the age. 4. At the age of seventeen he entered on the profession of an advocate, and pleaded his first cause at Delf, with the greatest reputation, having previously made an extraordinary progress in the knowledge of the sciences. The Admira EARLY DISPLAY OF GENIUS. 213 ble Crichton, who received his education at Perth and St. Andrews, by the time he had reached his twentieth year, was master of ten languages, and had gone through the whole circle of the sciences as they were then understood. 5. At Paris he one day engaged in a disputation, which lasted nine hours, in the presence of three thousand auditors, against four doctors of the church, and fifty masters, on every subject they could propose; and, having silenced all his antagonists, he came off amidst the loudest acclamations, though he had spent no time in previous preparation for the contest. 6. Gassendi, a celebrated philosopher of France, at the age of four, declaimed little sermons of his own composi tion; at the age of seven, spent whole nights in observing the motions of the heavenly bodies, of which he acquired a considerable knowledge at sixteen; he was appointed professor of rhetoric at Digne, and, at the age of nineteen, he was elected professor of philosophy in the university of Aix. His vast knowledge of philosophy and mathematics was ornamented by a sincere attachment to the Christian religion, and a life formed upon its principles and precepts. 7. Jeremiah Horrox, a name celebrated in the annals of astronomy, before he attained the age of seventeen, had acquired, solely by his own industry, and the help of a few Latin authors, a most extensive and thorough knowledge of astronomy, and of the branches of mathematical learning connected with it. He composed astronomical tables for himself, and corrected the errors of the most celebrated astronomers of his time. He calculated a transit of the planet Venus across the sun's disk, and was the first of mortals who beheld this singular phenomenon, which is now considered of so much importance in astronomical science. 8. Sir Isaac Newton, the same of whose genius has extended over the whole civilized world, made his great discoveries in geometry and fluxions, and laid the foundation of his two celebrated works, his "Principia" and "Optics," by the time he was twenty-four years of age; and yet these works contain so many abstract and sublime truths, that only the first-rate mathematicians are qualified to understand and appreciate them. In learning mathematics, he did not study the geometry of Euclid, which seemed to him too plain and simple, and unworthy of taking up his time. |