Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school with
any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive appellation,
and in his features as special and definite an expression of his sole
individuality as if he were the first created of his race: As soon as
we are old enough to get the range of three or four generations well in
hand, and to take in large family histories, we never see an individual
in a face of any stock we know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with
fragmentary tints from this and that ancestor. The analysis of a face
into its ancestral elements requires that it should be examined in the
very earliest infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look
it brings with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief
space when Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his
silent servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he
has wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after feature,
from the slight outline to the finished portrait.

--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
identified with ourselves. In early years, while the child "feels its
life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a very
great extent. It ought to be so. There have been many very interesting
children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the things of earth
and an extraordinary development of the spiritual nature. There is a
perfect literature of their biographies, all alike in their essentials;
the same "disinclination to the usual amusements of childhood ";
the same remarkable sensibility; the same docility; the same
conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform character, marked by
beautiful traits, which we look at with a painful admiration. It will
be found that most of these children are the subjects of some
constitutional unfitness for living, the most frequent of which I need
not mention. They are like the beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit
that falls before its time because its core is gnawed out. They have
their meaning,--they do not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls. I am
convinced that many healthy children are injured morally by being forced
to read too much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
exercises. Here is a boy that loves to run,