Laura Spencer Portor

“ It is, I know, often said that every child is a poet; but I think this an exaggerative fiction, and I could give bond that I was none. So far as I know and can recall, there is no person more desirous of exactness, more perfectly downright in his wishes, than a child. He is compounded of amazement and wonder. He lives upon perpetual inquiry and the direct hope of finding an answer to his questions. ”

“ But mystery continued to have its way with me. If I asked direct questions of the religious about the unknowable, I was told it was a mystery, a fact I already knew all too well. Directness, simplicity, sincerity, were losing ground. By no wish of my own I was being bound over to the majority of these people who it must be, by every assumption of their own and others, were my betters. They did not choose to use plain language. They spoke for the most part in riddles worse even than the bewildering bat. They made it approximately clear that mystery was a virtue. ”

“ But, above all, among all these bewilderments, absurdities, riddles, contradictions, and incertitudes, I cannot be blind to a certain inviolable honor that abides; something in human nature which yet commands, though it cannot always deserve, our reverence. For it is by no means little children only, though they most obviously, who preserve in perpetuity the dignity of the race. Let be our follies and mistakes; the gentle and memorable fact remains that some dignity incorruptible resides sovereign in man's spirit, and, it would seem, must triumph at last inviolate in his destiny ”

“ Indeed, to speak truth, I have even come to believe that their mystification of children is not an altogether voluntary affair. I cannot get rid of the impression, as I look into the faces of those I know and do not know, of a tired evening, that they themselves are not entirely clear. A bewilderment is often evident in their eyes also. ”

“ I have strongly the impression, too, that some of them have, not in childhood only, desired, yes, and still desire with ineradicable longing, the moon, and have been offered an inadequate substitute through all the later years; have hoped not only once in early, unspoiled days, but persistently, with unconquerable hope, to solve the unsolvable; are indeed still trying, and have not yet been brought to "give up" the riddle of life, though it, like that of the bat, seems to them equally without solution or syntax. ”

“ They overspread life with such dazzling contradictions that, just as in war-days it was often impossible to say whether a war-ship was more like a zebra or a zebra more like a warship, so now by turns you could not have told whether you were the rather stolid little girl you had innocently believed yourself to be, or a broken and empty vessel, a stranded sailor, a Christian soldier, a lost sheep, a jewel to be set in a crown, or a miserable sinner, without health in you. ”

“ While the specially downright and logical young of our species undoubtedly suffer much at the hands of our habit of mystification, and the spirits most sensitively endowed with a love of truth, and therefore the most fit for high adventure, are, as a rule, the very ones most utterly lost to the world through this process of opacity, yet there are, to offset these, the better poised, the more normal, the more commonplace, if you like, the happy-go-lucky as well as the downright merry, who manage somehow to elude fairly well the atrophying effects of mystification ”

“ They are foisted on him by a community of grown-ups who have in their turn in early years been forced by another set of indirect elders to compromise with life and their own longings.
The child is rarely in doubt as to what he wants, and does not conceal his longings. Fire pleases him, and he would put his hand on it if he were not intercepted. The moon meets with his approval, and if he had his own way and the direct fulfilment of his desires, the world would go moonless that night to bed. He is, so far as I know, the only absolutely whole-hearted explorer in the world ”

“ Day by day you lost self-confidence; your complacency leaked away unsuspected, drop by drop. Less and less you thought for yourself, more and more you depended on your spiritual advisers. Uncertainty possessed you, doubt assailed you, fear beset you ”

“ But though the child maintains this direction, now note carefully the course of his elders; mark how they offer him makeshifts and substitutes, a rattle in place of that thing Prometheus gave his eternal peace and godlike happiness to possess, and an apple in place of the mellow moon, which has been the mother of men's delights for many ages. I have always found a child's tastes sound and in accordance with the gods. It is his elders who persistently pull him away from their company. ”

“ There are children, I know, who soon capitulate, who early accept the ruling of their elders that the world is a place of utter unlikelihoods, that uncertainty characteristic; they simply accept the fact that life reflects itself on the retina not in the dignity of uprightness, but rather stands consistently and perpetually on its head. ”

“ It would not surprise me to find that nature, when too dangerously threatened, sets up, whether it be in so tiny a creature as the bee or in one of such unlimited powers as the human soul, some desire for self-protection ”

“ They were much given to expressing themselves in irrelevant proverbs.
"It never rains but it pours," a phrase my mother used often, has much to recommend it, no doubt, if mere economy and utility are in question; but to me, and said in all seasons, or when the sky was as blue as June and fine weather could make it, it was a bewilderment. ”

“ They pause to give you one more chance to stand with the intelligent, then slowly, as though to make mistake impossible, "The higher—the fewer."
And it is at that moment, unless you happen to be a future Sappho or Cæsar, Napoleon, Lincoln, or Confucius, that you yield to the larger force. You abandon honesty and you pretend that you see. You fall innocently into the new trick and trap that they have laid for you. And they laugh anew at your pretense, these grown-ups of a certain type, and think it a joke ”

“ Let them have done trailing those clouds of glory; put on sackcloth, touch their forehead with ashes, in token of humility and abasement, and learn from their elders how to behave themselves soberly of a Sunday. Let them believe as we do, and they will be welcomed into our communion ”

“ They simply began with a few chords on the Sunday-school piano, and then struck straight into all inconsistency and contradiction. After having carefully and at some pains taught you that a lie was one of the very worst sins, the leader of the Sunday-school, baton in hand, then indicated that the moment had come for you to join in asserting stoutly to music (he even insisted on the stoutness) that "Once you were blind, but now you could see," or he called on you to declare, "I am weary, so weary of sin," which had not the slightest foundation either in fact or probability. ”

“ I have seen not infrequently the same questioning and almost bewildered look in the eyes of the old that I have seen in those of little children, and I am sometimes inclined to think the dear long-held questions of their hearts have hardly received better answers. ”

“ When I came to an age and understanding that enabled me to ask really leading questions whose answers would have been extremely useful for my purposes, there developed those age-old replies, devices thought of Heaven knows how many eons ago, for the express purpose of befogging the dawning intellect. ”

“ Here, it seemed, one came under the influence of a larger conspiracy, where an entire body and congregation of people united to give themselves over, horse, foot, deacons, and dragoons, to such mysteries as were utterly beyond the province of one's experience or best imagination. ”

“ And I shall be whi-ter than sno-o-ow!
No one seemed either to remark or object to any of these extraordinary discrepancies. The grown-ups in charge of the matter neither explained nor reasoned with you. ”