shelter, and world-room, and leave each to
act out his own nature without let or hindrance.

But everybody takes an embryo human being with some plan of one's own
what it shall do or be. The child's future shall shape out some darling
purpose or plan, and fulfill some long unfulfilled expectation of the
parent. And thus, though the wind of every generation sweeps its hopes
and plans like forest-leaves, none are whirled and tossed with more
piteous moans than those which come out green and fresh to shade the
happy spring-time of the cradle. For the temperaments of children are
often as oddly unsuited to parents as if capricious fairies had been
filling cradles with changelings.

A meek member of the Peace Society, a tender, devout, poetical
clergyman, receives an heir from heaven, and straightway devotes him to
the Christian ministry. But lo! the boy proves a young war-horse,
neighing for battle, burning for gunpowder and guns, for bowie-knives
and revolvers, and for every form and expression of physical force;--he
might make a splendid trapper, an energetic sea-captain, a bold, daring
military man, but his whole boyhood is full of rebukes and disciplines
for sins which are only the blind effort of the creature to express a
nature which his parent does not and cannot understand. So again, the
son that was to have upheld the old, proud merchant's time-honored firm,
that should have been mighty in ledgers and great upon 'Change, breaks
his father's heart by an unintelligible fancy for weaving poems and
romances. A father of literary aspirations, balked of privileges of
early education, bends over the cradle of his son with but one idea.
This child shall have the full advantages of regular college-training;
and so for years he battles with a boy abhorring study, and fitted only
for a life of out-door energy and bold adventure,--on whom Latin forms
and Greek quantities fall and melt aimless and useless, as snow-flakes
on the hide of a buffalo. Then the secret agonies,--the long years of
sorrowful watchings of those gentler nurses of humanity who receive the
infant into their bosom out of the void unknown, and strive to read its
horoscope through the mists of their prayers and tears!--what
perplexities,--what confusion! Especially is this so in a community
where the moral and religious sense is so cultivated as in New England,
and frail, trembling, self-distrustful mothers are told that the shaping
and ordering not only of t