essed with
the magnificence of the scenes to which he was introduced when he
arrived in Media, and with the gayeties and luxuries, the pomp and
display, and the spectacles and parades in which the Median court
abounded. Astyages himself took great pleasure in witnessing and
increasing his little grandson's admiration for these wonders. It is
one of the most extraordinary and beautiful of the provisions which
God has made for securing the continuance of human happiness to the
very end of life, that we can renew, through sympathy with children,
the pleasures which, for ourselves alone, had long since, through
repetition and satiety, lost their charm. The rides, the walks, the
flowers gathered by the road-side, the rambles among pebbles on the
beach, the songs, the games, and even the little picture-book of
childish tales which have utterly and entirely lost their power to
affect the mind even of middle life, directly and alone, regain their
magic influence, and call up vividly all the old emotions, even to the
heart of decrepit age, when it seeks these enjoyments in companionship
and sympathy with children or grandchildren beloved. By giving to us
this capacity for renewing our own sensitiveness to the impressions of
pleasure through sympathy with childhood, God has provided a true and
effectual remedy for the satiety and insensibility of age. Let any one
who is in the decline of years, whose time passes but heavily away,
and who supposes that nothing can awaken interest in his mind or give
him pleasure, make the experiment of taking children to a ride or to a
concert, or to see a menagerie or a museum, and he will find that
there is a way by which he can again enjoy very highly the pleasures
which he had supposed were for him forever exhausted and gone.

This was the result, at all events, in the case of Astyages and Cyrus.
The monarch took a new pleasure in the luxuries and splendors which
had long since lost their charm for him, in observing their influence
and effect upon the mind of his little grandson. Cyrus, as we have
already said, was very frank and open in his disposition, and spoke
with the utmost freedom of every thing that he saw. He was, of course,
a privileged person, and could always say what the feeling of the
moment and his own childish conceptions prompted, without danger. He
had, however, according to the account which Xenophon gives, a great
deal of good sense, as well as of sprightliness and brillian