By the word of the prophet Hosea, the Divine reproach fell on Ephraim and on Judah, that their goodness was as a morning cloud, and that as the early dew it passed away. Bright was the promise of innocent dawn, but the promise was unfulfilled. A stern moral application lies in the words of Dante:

Adam Smith observes, in his “Theory of Moral Sentiment,” that, in the eye of nature, it would seem, a child is a more important object than an old man, and excites a much more lively, as well as a much more universal sympathy. “It ought to do so,” he adds. “Everything may be expected, or at least hoped, from the child. In ordinary cases, very little can be either expected or hoped from the old man.” It is regretful, remorseful eld that is supposed to utter the lament, in gazing on childish faces and forms, heaven-encompassed infancy,—

Mrs. Trench writes to the poet of the “Pleasures of Memory,” and with direct reference to that poem, “In looking back, the only days I earnestly desire to recall, are those which glided away while I was ‘girt with growing infancy,’ and read in the eyes and the smiles of my children, who were affectionate and beautiful, a promise of happiness, such as this world can never fulfil.” A more vigorous poet than Samuel Rogers, has a vigorous but gloomy stanza on the kindling emotions of young motherhood, when the wife—

The fallen young mother in Mrs. Gaskell’s story hails in her child a new, pure, beautiful, innocent life, which she fondly imagines, in the early passion of maternal love, she can guard from every touch of corrupting sin by ever watchful and most tender care. “And her mother had thought the same, most probably; and thousands of others think the same, and pray to God to purify and cleanse their souls, that they may be fit guardians for their little children.”

Juvenal asks, “what morn’s so holy but its sun betrays theft, perfidy, and fraud.” The thief, the betrayer, the cheat, was once a child. Ovid urges the dissimilitude between such a man and such a child: dissimiles hic vir, et ille puer. The Abbé Delille expatiates on the attractions of each Spring-tide, and, by affinity, of each new-born Day, as consisting in its refreshing redolence of promise—“qui ne nous fait que des promesses.” Fraught with feeling in every line is the following sonnet addressed by the late Baron Alderson to one of his children on her second birthday:

George Eliot somewhere speaks of a promise void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach—impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed. Mr. Dickens says of the faint image of Eden which is stamped upon our hearts in childhood, that it “chafes and rubs in our rough struggles with the world, and soon wears away; too often to leave nothing but a mournful blank remaining.” Elia, the essay writer, is no way backward to own the demerits and even delinquencies of himself as Elia, the middle aged man; but for the child Elia, that “other me,” there, in the background,—he must take leave to cherish the remembrance of that young master—with as little reference, he protests, to this stupid changeling of five-and-forty, as if it had been a child of some other house, and not his father’s son. “I know how it shrank from any the least colour of falsehood. God help thee, Elia, how art thou changed! Thou art sophisticated. I know how honest, how courageous (for a weakling) it was—how religious, how imaginative, how hopeful. From what have I not fallen, if the child I remember was indeed myself!”

Stupid changelings of forty-five, their name is Legion, for they are indeed many. Glance with Shenstone at the shiny row of plump promissory faces in the dame school:—

So, to apply the words of Hazlitt, if we look back to past generations (as far as eye can reach), we see the same fears, hopes, wishes, followed by the same disappointments, throbbing in the human heart; and so we may ever see them (if we look forward) rising up for ever, and disappearing like vapourish bubbles. Capable of application even are Joanna Baillie’s lines assimilating the stupid changelings aforesaid to a dull cat in contrast with its sprightly, mercurial kittenhood:—

Il y a en chacun de nous, writes Sainte-Beuve, un être primitif, idéal, que la nature a dessiné de sa main la plus maternelle, mais que l’homme trop souvent étoffe ou corrompt. Mr. Kingsley, in a touching reflection—literally reflection, looking back—on the “long lost might-have been,” adverts to that personal idea which every soul brings with it into the world, which shines dim and potential in the face of every sleeping babe, before it has been scarred, and distorted, and encrusted in the long tragedy of life. Dr. Caird has said of the birthday of the worst of men, that although it ushered a new agent of evil into existence, and was a day fraught with more disastrous results to the world than the day in which the pestilence began to creep over the nations, or the blight to fasten on the food of man, or any other physical evil to enter on a career of world-wide devastation,—yet might this day, when the vilest of humanity first saw the light, be in some aspects of it regarded as better (despite Solomon’s text) than the day of his death. “For, to take only one view of it, when life commenced, the problem of good or evil, to which death has brought so terrible a solution, was, in his case, as yet unsolved. The page of human history which he was to write was yet unwritten, and to that day belonged, at all events, the advantage of the uncertainty whether it was to be blurred and blotted, or written fair and clean.” Life, even in the most unfavourable circumstances, it is urged, has ever some faint gleams of hope to brighten its outset. The preacher owns that the simplicity, the tenderness, the unconscious refinement that more or less characterize infancy, even among the lowest and rudest, soon indeed pass away, and give place to the coarseness of an unideal, if not the animal repulsiveness of a sensual or sinful life. But he insists that at least at the beginning, for a little while, there is something in the seeming innocency, the brightness, the unworldliness, the unworn freshness of childhood, that gives hope room to work. Is there not, he asks, for every child, not in the dreams of parental fondness only, but in reality, and in God’s idea, the possibility of a noble future? “The history of each new-born soul is surely in God’s plan and intention a bright and blessed one. For the vilest miscreant that was ever hounded out of life in dishonour and wretchedness, there was, in the mind of the All-Good, a Divine ideal, a glorious possibility of excellence, which might have been made a reality.” The most hardened ruffian, the most obdurate criminal, the most impenetrable reprobate, was once a child.

If it be a philosophical truth that the child is father of the man—all that is now broadly emblazoned in the man having been once latent—seen or not seen—as a vernal bud in the child; it is not therefore true universally, as Mr. de Quincey points out, that all which pre-exists in the child finds its development in the man. “Rudiments and tendencies, which might have found, sometimes by accident, do not find, sometimes under the killing frost of counter forces, cannot find, their natural evolution.” Most of what he has, the grown-up man is shown to inherit from his infant self; but it does not follow that he always enters upon the whole of his natural inheritance. Childhood has been passionately apostrophized as