Boy

“ List to the ring of the midnight song! 'Tis somebody's boy; The winds give to every wild echo a tongue. Yes, somebody's boy; The witch of the revel has waved her wand Over somebody's boy; And the spirit of evil has clasped the hand Of somebody's boy. Comes now a yell on the midnight air From somebody's boy; Reckless, defiant, and devil-may-care, Is somebody's boy. Foul is the bed, madly dark the dank cell, Where somebody's boy Is writhing in torture, the veriest hell, Yet, somebody's boy. Waiting and watching, a mother's eyes weep For somebody's boy ”

“ What a horror it brings to the heart of a boy! Fresh from the green fields, from the blue sky, from the fragrant woods, the babbling brook, the sounding shore, the lofty precipice, the bounding wave,—from all these he enters into the gloom, and darkness, and confinement of the school-room. Can there be any wonder that the fresh, young, boyish heart should quail, and his bounding young life droop, and his uproarious spirits flag on that dreary first day? ”

“ The fair boy that runs to her knees, With a shout for his mother, and kiss For the tear-drop that welling he sees To her eyes from her sorrow's abyss,— Though he blooms like a rose, the fair boy, No praise of his beauty is heard ”

“ But master and boys, when they look around them, begin to tremble, for their place is old, it is beautiful, it adorns the street, it is sacred to the memory of two hundred years of Boy—thirty generations of Boy. ”

“ Let the father or the mother think long before they send away their boy—before they break the home-ties that make a web of infinite fineness and soft silken meshes around his heart, and toss him aloof into the boy-world, where he must struggle up amid bickerings and quarrels, into his age of youth! There are boys, indeed, with little fineness in the texture of their hearts, and with little delicacy of soul ”

“ How grand is the boy who has kept himself undefiled! His complexion clear, his muscles firm, his movements vigorous, his manner frank, his courage undaunted, his brain active, his will firm, his self-control perfect, his body and mind unfolding day by day. His life should be one song of praise and thanksgiving. If you want your boy to be such a one, train him, my dear woman, to-day, and his to-morrow will take care of itself. ”

“ I once knew a little boy, a little child of three years old; one of those bright creatures whose fair loveliness seems more of heaven than of earth—even at a passing glimpse stirring our hearts, and filling them with purer and holier thought. ”

“ If some otter or great fish breaks the water and the stillness with a sudden splash, a boy feels a romantic thrill, a pause of expectation, that later he will never experience. “The thoughts of a boy are long, long thoughts,” says the poet; he thinks them out by himself on the downs, or the hills, and tells them to nobody. ”

“ But take them civilised or natural, those who love and observe little children no more expect to find that peculiar exquisite charm of the girl-child which I have endeavoured to describe in the boy, than they would expect the music of the wood-lark and the airy fairy grace and beauty of the grey wagtail in Philip Sparrow. And yet, incredible as it seems, that very quality of the miraculous little girl is sometimes found in the boy and, with it, strange to say, the boy's proper mind and spirit. ”

“ Here is a pretty boy comes with an Epilogue to get him audacity. I pray you, sit still a little and hear him say his lesson without book. It is a good boy: be not afraid: turn thy face to my lord. Thou and I will play at pouch to-morrow morning for breakfast. Come and sit on my knee, and I'll dance thee, if thou canst not endure to stand. ”

“ Now and then there is the ambitious boy, and then again there is your studious boy; there is your bookish boy; there is your shy boy who does not get into the games. He is the boy you should watch all the time. There is the boy who has become delicate and finicky, because he has been doddled at home. I hope you haven't got so many of them here as we have in the East, but he is here and you must watch him, because his parents are doing everything in the world to spoil him. ”

“ Bartley's Orrery, to the Panopticon, or into the country, to a friend's house, or to his favourite watering-place. Wherever he goes, this uneasy shadow attends him. A boy is at his board, and in his path, and in all his movements. He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. ”

“ With Arcady for judge great Pan himself
Should own him foiled, and from the field retire.
Begin to greet thy mother with a smile,
O baby-boy! ten months of weariness
For thee she bore: O baby-boy, begin! ”

“ There is a boy there, whom I cannot make out,—a short, square boy, with tasseled skull-cap, and a face that never changes its expression, and never has any expression to change; he may be older than these hills; he looks old enough to be his own father: and there is a girl, his counterpart, who might be, judging her age by her face, the mother of both of them. ”

“ September, 1916.
[Pg 48]
II.—BOY
In a far field, away from England, lies
A Boy I friended with a care like love;
All day the wide earth aches, the cold wind cries,
The melancholy clouds drive on above. ”

“ I was not interested, and the teacher did not make it interesting.
[322] In the boys' books I was fond of reading I came across all sorts of heroes, and I sympathized with them all. The boy who ran away to sea; the boy who delighted in the society of ranchmen and cowboys; the stage-struck boy, whose ambition was to drive a pasteboard chariot in a circus; the boy who gave up his holidays in order to earn money for books; the bad boy who played tricks on people; the clever boy who invented amusing toys for his blind little sister—all these boys I admired. ”

“ It seems odd that a strapping, pimple-faced, freckled, red-headed boy, loudmouthed and husky-voiced, more or less turbulent and generally in trouble for his insistent defense of his weaker playmates–it seems odd that such a boy could be the center of such grand dreams as they dreamed for their boy. ”

“ Some folks pray for a boy, and some
For a golden-haired little girl to come.
Some claim to think there is more of joy
Wrapped up in the smile of a little boy,
While others pretend that the silky curls
And plump, pink cheeks of the little girls
Bring more of bliss to the old home place
Than a small boy's queer little freckled face. ”

“ BOY-PROBLEMS, like boys, are always with us. Wherever there is a boy there are problems to be solved. The perfect boy may live somewhere—but not in my immediate neighborhood. Even though he possesses many of the attributes of perfection, he will be found wanting in industry, or thrift, or orderliness, or courtesy, or studiousness. He may even show such [2] traits as disobedience, untruthfulness, selfishness, truancy, thievery, or immorality. The complete boy does not just grow—he is builded and the parent is both architect and builder. ”

“ No sooner have we finished with our public school days, when we are known as boys, and have either scrambled over the “Smalls” hedge with some humility and relief, or else have secured the privilege of lording it in a scholar’s gown, than we instantly become men. We may be anything between eighteen and twenty, but if a sister, brother, or cousin be unwary enough to refer to us as a boy—woe unto him or her! ”

“ He had put the gloom of the shadow that formerly rested over his soul aside, and in that strange household, surrounded by young people, by nature, by activity, by life, and hope, and strength, he grew light-hearted, and with boys became as a boy, capable of enjoying each day that dawned upon the earth. ”

“ Among them, most eager, most intense, most frequent of all associations, there is a boy with nerves all a-tingle at the vast sweet mystery that rustled in every wood, following the call of the winds and the birds, or wandering alone where the spirit moved him, who never studied nature consciously, but only loved it, and who found out many of these Ways long ago, guided solely by a boy's instinct. ”

“ How the little boy cries because he cannot spin his top like the older brothers! He learns to spin it, and is delighted with its snoring hum; learning skill by that, he by and by goes on to higher acts of boyish life. ”

“ In an unpublished story written fifteen years later, the description of his hero's boyhood has many passages in it which are unmistakably drawn from his own experience. The dreams which mingle with the healthy life of a boy, the first beginnings of thought, of sentiment, of romance, are touched in these passages from knowledge and vivid recollection. ”

“ To the small boy there were meat and drink, sights and sounds illimitable, and a tenseness of excitement that thrilled him with a thousand thrills, for in the presence and sound of the great men of his country the boy’s heart must expand and his ambition take fire. ”

“ When your four-year-old boy came to you with his stories of what he would do when he was "a great big man," you drew him close to you and encouraged him to "talk it all out." Now, when he is a head taller than you, and tells you of his hopes and aspirations, you sigh that "boys are so fresh and visionary!" ”

“ The pure but ignorant boy going for the first time into the new life of the school, looking up to the older boys with that peculiar veneration the younger boy almost always feels for the older, moved in his senses by what he hears and sees, may speedily forget such home warnings as seem vague and pointless, and he may yield himself to a course most disastrous to his future. ”

“ No wonder that your son comes into the room with a confused expression of uncomfortable pain on every feature, when he does not in the least know whether he will be recognized as a gentleman, or overlooked as a little boy. ”

“ I know a friend who's got a beef-faced boy; a fine boy they call him, with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a horrid boy, with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of the seams of his blue clothes—with the voice of a pilot, and the appetite of a wolf. ”

“ Beyond a trick of nervously hunching up one shoulder, of wriggling his body when talking, and squinting at people, especially his elders, he is, after all, only a good deal of the every-day, ubiquitous, dream-weaving, nondescript and much misunderstood creature known as Boy. ”

“ One day, having, in a street of the city where he dwelt, rescued from danger a boy about ten years of age, he went with him to his mother, and begged that he might take him to his house for a week. When they heard his name, the parents willingly let their son go with him. And he taught him many things, and the boy loved and trusted him.
When the boy was asleep in bed, the wise man would go to his room at midnight, and lay his ear to his ear, and hearken to his dreams. Then he would stand and spread out his arms over him and look up. And the boy would smile, and his sleep was the deeper. ”

“ THE BOY’S VIEWPOINT A CORRECT understanding of boy-nature is conditioned on one’s ability to obtain his point of view, which differs widely from that of the adult. It has been stated in a previous chapter that the viewpoints of a boy at six, ten, fourteen, and eighteen years of age differ as widely from each other as those of four adults of remotely differing natures and temperaments. We frequently make the mistake of assuming that the boy is a small edition of a man, possessing faculties, emotions, desires, and understanding the same as in the adult but developed in a lesser degree. ”

“ That afternoon the whole world seemed to devote itself to being perfect and radiantly beautiful and kind to one boy. ”

“ You are a human boy, my young friend. A human boy. O glorious to be a human boy! ”

“ The second boy, equally tattered as he was as to clothing, I could see at a glance exhibited, distinctly, points of advantage over him. He was cleaner, both as to flesh and dress; and the stamp or stain of precocious experience was not recognisable in his face. It also occurred to my mind that the few words I had heard him speak were better spoken, and in themselves, more correct than those which had issued from the other's lips. ”

“ Phillpotts pictures a boy, a real human boy. The boy's way of thinking, his outlook upon life, his ambitions, his ideals, his moods, his peculiarities, these are all here touched with a kindly sympathy and humor."—New York Sun. ”

“ It is always thus with boys. Not till their own imprudence plunges them into difficulties, do they pause to consider what it all means, and what they had better do. When a boy is small he clambers upon the roof of his father’s barn, enjoys the perspective for one brief moment, and then ruminates as to how he shall get down. ”

“ It is a source of consolation to know that, in whatever circumstance a boy may be placed, there is, amidst the desolate and cheerless scenes a harbinger of comfort, a helm to keep his course in the right channel, and a north star on which to fix his eyes, namely, hope. ”

“ Oh, when I was a tiny boy,
My days and nights were full of joy,
My mates were blithe and kind!—
No wonder that I sometimes sigh,
And dash the tear-drop from my eye,
To cast a look behind! ”

“ My boy, then, is the average boy, old enough to walk and talk and understand what is said to him, moderately sensitive, moderately affectionate, moderately impulsive, moderately perverse, of ordinarily good health, and possessed of the usual amount of animal spirits. ”

“ Even you, most inveterate and selfish and calloused votary of the chase—you have a tender spot in your hard old heart for the baby boy. He may not be all that is orderly, obedient, non-combatable, non-destructive, but still we all love him! ”