present.




THAT PRETTY PERSON


During the many years in which "evolution" was the favourite word, one
significant lesson--so it seems--was learnt, which has outlived
controversy, and has remained longer than the questions at issue--an
interesting and unnoticed thing cast up by the storm of thoughts. This
is a disposition, a general consent, to find the use and the value of
process, and even to understand a kind of repose in the very wayfaring of
progress. With this is a resignation to change, and something more than
resignation--a delight in those qualities that could not be but for their
transitoriness.

What, then, is this but the admiration, at last confessed by the world,
for childhood? Time was when childhood was but borne with, and that for
the sake of its mere promise of manhood. We do not now hold, perhaps,
that promise so high. Even, nevertheless, if we held it high, we should
acknowledge the approach to be a state adorned with its own conditions.

But it was not so once. As the primitive lullaby is nothing but a
patient prophecy (the mother's), so was education, some two hundred years
ago, nothing but an impatient prophecy (the father's) of the full stature
of body and mind. The Indian woman sings of the future hunting. If her
song is not restless, it is because she has a sense of the results of
time, and has submitted her heart to experience. Childhood is a time of