Alexander Francis Chamberlain

“ All these are oracles, whose priest and interpreter is the child; first, in "those sweet, childish days that were as long as twenty days are now," and then again when love rules the heart and the appeal to the arbitrament of nature—for not alone all mankind but all nature loves a lover—is made in deepest faith and confidence. In the golden age of childhood and in the springtime of love all nature is akin to man. The dandelion is especially favoured as an oracle of children, and of those who are but "children of a larger growth." ”

“ The Paradise that man lost, the Eden from which he has been driven, is not the God-planted Garden by the banks of Euphrates, but the "happy days of angel infancy," and "boyhood's time of June," the childhood out of which in the fierce struggle—for existence the race has rudely grown, and back to which, for its true salvation, it must learn to make its way again. As he, who was at once genius and child, said, nearly twenty centuries ago: "Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." ”

“ The history of civilization is the story of the mother, a story that stales not with repetition. Richter, in his Levana, makes eloquent appeal:—
"Never, never has one forgotten his pure, right-educating mother! On the blue mountains of our dim childhood, towards which we ever turn and look, stand the mothers who marked out for us from thence our life; the most blessed age must be forgotten ere we can forget the warmest heart. You wish, O woman, to be ardently loved, and forever, even till death. ”

“ We shall see hundreds of small children, not more than five or six years of age, carrying, fast asleep on their shoulders, the baby of the household, its tiny smooth brown head swinging hither and thither with every movement of its small nurse, who walks, runs, sits, or jumps, flies kites, plays hop-scotch, and fishes for frogs in the gutter, totally oblivious of that infantile charge, whether sleeping or waking. If no young sister or brother be available, the husband, the uncle, the father, or grandfather hitches on his back the baby, preternaturally good and contented. ”

“ As Henry Ward Beecher has well said, "the mother's heart is the child's school-room." Well might the Egyptian mother-goddess say (167. 261) : "I am the mother who shaped thy beauties, who suckled thee with milk; I give thee with my milk festal things, that penetrate thy limbs with life, strength, and youth; I make thee to become the—great ruler of Egypt, lord of the space which the sun circles round." In the land of the Pharaohs they knew in some dim fashion that "the hand that rocks the cradle is the hand that rules the world." ”

“ The Golden Age of the past of which, through the long lapse of years, dreamers have dreamt and poets sung, and the Golden City, glimpses of whose glorious portal have flashed through the prayers and meditations of the rapt enthusiast, seem but one in their foundation, as the Eden of the world's beginning and the heaven that shall open to men's eyes, when time shall be no more, are but closely allied phases, nay, but one and the same phase, rather, of the world-old thought,—the ethnic might have been, the ought to be of all the ages. ”

“ Hera, queen of harvests, feeder of mankind; Hestia, goddess of the hearth and home, of families and states, giving life and warmth; Aphrodite, the beautiful, patron of romantic love and personal charms; Hera, sovereign lady, divine caciquess, embodiment of queenly dignity; Pallas Athene, ideal image of that central inspiring force that we learn at our mother's knee, and that shone in eternal splendour; Isis, the goddess of widowhood, sending forth her son Horus, to avenge the death of his father, Osiris; as moon-goddess, keeping alive the light until the sun rises again to bless the world. ”

“ That children have some rights in the matter is a view that is slowly but surely fixing itself in the minds of the people,—that the school should be something more than an intellectual prison-house, a mental and moral tread-mill, a place to put children in out of the way of the family, a dark cave into which happy, freedom-loving, joyous childhood must perforce retire from that communion with nature which makes the health of its body and the salvation of its soul. ”

“ As hero and adventurer, passing over into divinity, the child has explored earth, sea, and sky, descending into nethermost hell to rescue the bones of his father, and setting ajar the gates of Paradise, that the radiant glory may be seen of his mother on earth. Finally, as Christ sums up all that is divine in men, so does the Christ-Child sum up all that is God- like in the child. The Man-Jesus stands at the head of mankind, the Child-Jesus is the first of the children of men. ”

“ As men, in the dim, prehistoric past, ascribed to their first progenitors a celestial, a terrestrial, a subterranean, a subaqueous origin, a coming into being from animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, rocks, stones, etc.,—for all were then akin,—so, after long centuries have rolled by, father, mother, nurse, older brother or sister, speaking of the little one in whom they see their stock renewed, or their kinship widened, resurrect and regild the old fables and rejuvenate and reanimate the lore that lay sunk beneath the threshold of racial consciousness. ”

“ All over the globe we find wonder-tales of childhood, stories of the great deeds of children, whose venturesomeness has saved whole communities from destruction, whose heroism has rid the world of giants and monsters of every sort, whose daring travels and excursions into lands or skies unknown have resulted in the great increase of human knowledge and the advancement of culture and civilization. In almost all departments of life the child-hero has left his mark, and there is much to tell of his wonderful achievements. ”

“ They have figured in the world's history and its folk-lore as magi and "medicine-men," as priests and oracle-keepers, as physicians and healers, as teachers and judges, as saints, heroes, discoverers, and inventors, as musicians and poets, actors and labourers in many fields of human activity, have been compared to the foolish and to the most wise, have been looked upon as fetiches and as gods, as the fit sacrifice to offended Heaven, and as the saviours and regenerators of mankind. ”

“ The children of primitive races enjoy music, as well as their fellows in civilized communities. The lullaby, that quod semper ubique et ab omnibus of vocal art, early engages and entrances the infantile ear, and from the musical demonstrations of his elders, the child is not always or everywhere excluded. Indeed, the infant is often ushered into the world amid the din and clamour of music and song which serve to drown the mother's cries of pain, or to express the joy of the family or the community at the successful arrival of the little stranger. ”

“ In the long winter evenings, while the fire burns brightly in the centre of the lodge, and the men are gathered in to smoke, he hears the folk-lore and legends of his people from the lips of the older men. He learns to sing the love-songs and the war-songs of the generations gone by. There is no new path for him to tread, but he follows in the old ways. He becomes a Dakota of the Dakota. ”

“ May the child have good thoughts and know its mother-earth, the giver of food. May it have good thoughts and grow from childhood to manhood. May the child be beautiful and happy. Here is the child's bed; may the child be beautiful and happy. Ashes man, let me make good medicine for the child. We will receive the child into our arms, that it may be happy and contented. May it grow from childhood to manhood. ”

“ The idea that diseased and withered humanity, having failed to discover the fountain of eternal youth, might find a new well-spring of life in bathing in, or being sprinkled with, the pure blood of a child or a virgin, had long a firm hold upon the minds of the people. ”

“ Whether they live again,—as little children are often fabled to do,—when Earth laughs with flowers of spring, or become incarnate in other members of the animate or inanimate creation, whose kinship with man and with God is an article of the great folk-creed, or, in the beautiful words of the burial service of the Episcopal Church, sleep "earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, in sure and certain hope of the resurrection," all testifies that man is instinct with the life that throbs in the bosom of Earth, his Mother. ”

“ And with a holier fervour, even, are all things animate and inanimate said to feel the birth of a great poet, a hero, a genius, a prophet; all Nature thrills with joy at his advent and makes known her satisfaction with the good that has fallen to the lot of earth. ”

“ Tell our mothers we are not dead, but live and sing in this beautiful place, which is the home for them when they sleep. They will wake here and be always happy. And we are here to intercede with the sun, our father, that he may give to our people rain and the fruits of the earth, and all that is good for them. ”

“ That the father, as well as the mother, feels for his child after death, and appears to him, is an idea found in fairy-story and legend, but nowhere so sweetly expressed as in the beautiful Italian belief that "the kind, dear spirits of the dead relatives and parents come out of the tombs to bring presents to the children of the family,—whatever their little hearts most desire." ”

“ The consideration of "The Child in Folk-Thought,"—what tribe upon tribe, age after age, has thought about, ascribed to, dreamt of, learned from, taught to, the child, the parent-lore of the human race, in its development through savagery and barbarism to civilization and culture,—can bring to the harvest of pedagogy many a golden sheaf. ”

“ Nothing is more easily possessed than a small object, and before the one we love we would change ourselves into a bird, a canary—into any minute thing that we might be held utterly in the hands, that we might feel ourselves pressed on all sides by the warm and loving fingers. There is also another secret reason for the use of diminutives. Little creatures are loved tenderly, and tenderness is the supreme sign of every great force which is dissolved and consumes itself. ”

“ With the birth of a child, the Chinese woman becomes something more than a mere slave and plaything, and in the councils of uncivilized peoples (as with us to-day) the voice of the father of a family carries more weight than that of the childless. With the civilized races to-day, more marriages mean fewer prison-houses, and more empty jails, than in the earlier days, and with the primitive peoples of the present, this social bond was the salvation of the tribe to the same extent and in the same way. ”

“ All of her children were born of pieces of flesh which she plucked off her own body; the first-born was the man-fish Vatea, "father of gods and men," whose one eye is the sun, the other the moon; the fifth child was Raka, to whom his mother gave the winds in a basket, and "the children of Raka are the numerous winds and storms which distress mankind. To each child is allotted a hole at the edge of the horizon, through which he blows at pleasure." In the songs the gods are termed "the children of Vatea," and the ocean is sometimes called "the sea of Vatea." ”

“ It is a sad comment upon our boasted culture and progress that, as of old, the law protects, and even religion fears to disturb too rudely, this awful sacrifice to lust which we have inherited from our savage ancestors. There is no darker chapter in the history of our country than that which tells of the weak pandering to the modern representatives of the priests of Bacchus, Astarte, and the shameless Venus. The religious aspect of the horrible immolation may have passed away, but wealth and social attractions have taken its place, and the evil works out its destroying way as ever. ”