nbow, how
he sat at his mother's feet and pricked into paper the tissued flowers
of her dress, how he chased the bright butterfly, or in his tenderness
feared to brush even the dust from off its wings, how he learnt sweet
lessons and said innocent prayers at his father's knee; trifles like
these, yet trifles which may have been rendered noble and beautiful by a
loving imagination, have been narrated over and over again in the songs
of our poets. The lovely lines of Henry Vaughan might be taken as a type
of thousands more:--

"Happy those early days, when I
Shined in my Angel infancy.
Before I understood this place
Appointed for my second race,
Or taught my soul to fancy aught
But a white celestial thought;

* * * * *

"Before I taught my tongue to wound
My conscience with a sinful sound
Or had the black art to dispense
A several sin to every sense;
But felt through all this fleshy dress,
Bright shoots of everlastingness."

The memory of every student of English poetry will furnish countless
parallels to thoughts like these. How is it that no similar poem could
be quoted from the whole range of ancient literature? How is it that to
the Greek and Roman poets that morning of life, which should have been
so filled with "natural blessedness," seems to have been a blank? How is
it that writers so voluminous, so domestic, so affectionate as Cicero,
Virgil, and Horace do not make so much as a single allusion to the
existence of their own mothers?

To answer this question fully would be to write an entire essay on the
difference between ancient and modern life, and would carry me far away
from my immediate subject.[1] But I may say generally, that the
explanation rests in the fact that in all probability childhood among
the ancients was a disregarded, and in most cases a far less happy,
period than it is with us. The birth of a child in the house of a Greek
or a Roman was not necessarily a subject for rejoicing. If the father,
when the child was first shown to him, stooped down and took it in his
arms, it was received as a member of the family; if he left it unnoticed
then it was doomed to death, and was exposed in some lonely or barren
place to the mercy of the wild beasts, or of the first passer by. And
even if a child escaped this fate, yet for the first seven or eight
years of life he was kept in the gynaeceum, or w