Alas! they are made to
feel money-matters, and even this is not the worst. There are
unconfessed worldliness, piques, and rivalries, of which they do not know
the names, but which change the faces where they look for smiles. To
such alterations children are sensitive even when they seem least
accessible to the commands, the warnings, the threats, or the counsels of
elders. Of all these they may be gaily independent, and yet may droop
when their defied tyrants are dejected.
For though the natural spirit of children is happy, the happiness is a
mere impulse and is easily disconcerted. They are gay without knowing
any very sufficient reason for being so, and when sadness is, as it were,
proposed to them, things fall away from under their feet, they are
helpless and find no stay. For this reason the merriest of all children
are those, much pitied, who are brought up neither in a family nor in a
public home by paid guardians, but in a place of charity, rightly named,
where impartial, unalterable, and impersonal devotion has them in hand.
They endure an immeasurable loss, and are orphans, but they gain in
perpetual gaiety; they live in an unchanging temperature. The separate
nest is nature's, and the best; but it might be wished that the separate
nest were less subject to moods. The nurse has her private business, and
when it does not prosper, and when the remote affairs of the governess go
wrong, the child receives the ultimate vibration of the mishap.
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