CHILDHOOD.

O Happy Childhood, free from taint of sin!
O Heart of Childhood, beating strong within!
Experience not yet boastful of its power,
No sorrow deeper than the passing hour,
Bequeaths to memory's page a draught sublime
Of which we quaff along the paths of Time.
Too soon we love to linger o'er the past

And live again through dreams too sweet to last.

-J. C. H.

A child's eyes, those clear wells of undefiled thought-what on earth can be more beautiful? Full of hope, love and curiosity, they meet your own. In prayer, how earnest; in joy, how sparkling; in sympathy, how tender! The man who never tried the companionship of a little child has carelessly passed by one of the great pleasures of life, as one passes a rare flower without plucking it or knowing its value.

-Mrs. Norton.

They are idols of hearts and of households;
They are angels of God in disguise ;
His sunlight still sleeps in their tresses;
His glory still gleams in their eyes.

Oh, those truants from home and from heaven,
They have made me more manly and mild
And I know now how Jesus could liken

The kingdom of God to a child.

-Dickens.

The smallest children are nearest to God, as the smallest planets are nearest the sun.

-Richter.

I love these little people; and it is not a slight thing when they, who are so fresh from God, love us.

-Dickens.

If a boy is not trained to endure and to bear trouble, he will grow up a girl; and a boy that is a girl has all a girl's weakness without any of her regal qualities. A woman made out of a woman is God's noblest work; a woman made out of a man is His meanest.

-Beecher.

Children are the keys of Paradise.

* * * They alone are good and wise, Because their thoughts, their very lives are

prayer.

-Stoddard.

Deep versed in books, and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,

And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge ;
As children gath'ring pebbles on the shore.
-Milton. Paradise Regained, Bk. IV.,
line 327.

Virtue best loves those children that she beats. -Herrick. Hesperides, 822.

Dreams;

Which are the children of an idle brain Begot of nothing but vain phantasy. -Shakspere. Romeo and Juliet (Mercutio), Act I., Sc. IV.

Men are but children of a larger growth;
Our appetites are apt to change as theirs,
And full as craving too, and full as vain.
-Dryden. All For Love, Act IV., Sc. I.

Unruly children make their sire stoop.
-Shakspere. Richard II. (Gardener),
Act III., Sc. IV.

(We need love's tender lesson taught
As only weakness can ;)

God hath His small interpreters ;

The child must teach the man.

-Ford.

Love feasts on toys,

For Cupid is a child.

The Broken Heart (Nearchus),
Act IV., Sc. I.

The plays of natural lively children are the infancy of art. Children live in a world of imagination and feeling. They invest the most insignificant object with any form they please and see in it whatever they wish to see.

-Oehlenschläger.

Beware," said Lavater, "of him who hates the laugh of a child." I love God and little children," was the simple yet sublime sentiment of Richter.

-Mrs. Sigourney.

Man to the last is but a froward child;
So eager for the future, come what may,
And to the present so insensible !

-Rogers. Reflections.

Old age, a second child, by nature curst
With more and greater evils than the first,
Weak, sickly, full of pains, in ev'ry breath;
Railing at life, and yet afraid of death.

-Churchill. Gotham, Bk. I., line 215.

To a mother, a child is everything; but to a child, a parent is only a link in the chain of her existence.

-Lord Beaconsfield.

Venetia (Lady Annabel), Bk. IV., Chap. XIV.

Man is a restless thing, still vain and wild, Lives beyond sixty, nor outgrows the child. -Watts. To the Memory of T. Gunston, Esq., Bk. III., line 189.

I do not like punishments. You will never torture a child into duty; but a sensible child will dread the frown of a judicious mother more than all the rods, dark rooms, and scolding schoolmistresses in the universe.

-H. K. White.

Truly there is nothing in the world so blessed or so sweet as the heritage of children.

-Mrs. Oliphant.

Children are the hands by which we take hold of heaven. By these tendrils we clasp it and climb thitherward. And why do we think that we are separated from them? We never half knew them, nor in this world could.

-Beecher.

Call not that man wretched who, whatever ills he suffers, has a child to love.

-Southey.

I hardly know so melancholy a reflection as that parents are necessarily the sole directors of the management of children, whether they have or have not judgment, penetration, or taste to perform the task.

-Lord Greville.

Blessed be the hand that prepares a pleasure for a child, for there is no saying when and where it may bloom forth.

-Douglas Ferrold.

Living jewels dropped unstained from heaven. -Pollock.

Our children that die young are like those spring bulbs which have their flowers prepared