they owe to father or mother, as the case may be, they have each
their peculiarities of form, and eye, and face, and still more, their
differences of intellect and mind. This may be dark, that fair; this
may have gray eyes, that black; this may be open and graceful, that
reserved and close; this you may love, that you can take no interest
in. One may be bashful, another winning, a third worth knowing and
yet hard to know. They are so like and so unlike. At first it may be,
as an old English writer beautifully expresses it, 'their father hath
writ them as his own little story', but as they grow up they throw
off the copy, educate themselves for good or ill, and finally assume
new forms of feeling and feature under an original development of
their own.

Or shall we take another likeness, and say they are national dreams;
that they are like the sleeping thoughts of many men upon one and the
same thing. Suppose a hundred men to have been eye-witnesses of some
event on the same day, and then to have slept and dreamt of it; we
should have as many distinct representations of that event, all
turning upon it and bound up with it in some way, but each preserving
the personality of the sleeper, and working up the common stuff in a
higher or lower degree, just as the fancy and the intellect of the
sleeper was at a higher or lower level of perfection. There is,
indeed, greater truth in this likeness than may at first sight
appear. In the popular tale, properly so called, the national mind
dreams all its history over again; in its half conscious state it
takes this trait and that trait, this feature and that feature, of
times and ages long past. It snatches up bits of its old beliefs, and
fears, and griefs, and glory, and pieces them together with something
that happened yesterday, and then holds up the distorted reflection
in all its inconsequence, just as it has passed before that magic