surrounds him; it hinders him from jarring in the
great concert where he is going to take his part, and it checks what
may be too irregular in his lively sallies.

So far for public education. Family life is liberty. Yet even here
there are obstacles and shackles to his original moral activity. The
father regulates this activity: his uneasy foresight imposes on him the
duty to bring early this wild young colt to the furrow, where he must
soon toil. It too often happens that the father makes a mistake,
consults, first of all, his own conveniences, and seeks the profitable
and ready traced career, rather than that to which his young and
powerful colt was called by nature.

The triumphs of the courser have frequently been lost in the trammels
of the riding-school.

Poor liberty! Who then will have eyes to see thee, or a heart to
cherish thee? Who will have the patience, the infinite indulgence
required to support thy first wanderings, and encourage occasionally
what fatigues the stranger, the indifferent person, nay, the father
himself? God alone, who has made this creature, and who, having made
him, knows him well enough to see and love what is good in him, even in
what is bad, God, I say, and with God the mother: for here it is one
and the same thing.

When we reflect that ordinary life is so short, and that so many die
very young, we hesitate to abridge this first, this best period of
life, when the child, free under its mother's protection, lives in
Grace, and not in the Law. But if it be true, as I think, that this
time, which people believe lost, is precisely the only precious and
irreparable period, in which among childish games sacred _genius_ tries
its first flight, the season when, becoming fledged, the young eagle
tries to fly--ah! pray do not shorten it. Do not banish the youth from
the maternal paradise before his time; give him one day more;
to-morrow, all well and good; God knows it will be soon enough!
To-morrow, he will bend to his work and crawl along the furrow. But
to-day, leave him there, let him gain full strength and life, and
breathe with an open heart the vital air of liberty. An education
which is too zealous and restless, and which exacts too much, is
dangerous for children. We are ever increasing the mass of study and
science, and such exterior acquisitions; but the interior suffers for
it. The one is nothing but Latin, the next shines in Mathematics; but
where is the _man_, I