Education in The Home, The Kindergarten, and The Primary School Part 9

A heavenly smile spread over his face and a look of perfect satisfaction and acquiescence, and he said after a moment's pause, "I forgot my Heavenly Father. Oh, what a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father He is!"

Then, after another moment, he said in a distressed voice, "But must I be broken all to pieces when I go to the Heavenly Father?"

"Oh, dear, no!" said I; "but when we are broken all to pieces, or starved, or are very sick, He takes us; but generally people grow to be old like the old man, and all their bodies get worn out, and they get very tired and kind of go to sleep, and the Heavenly Father takes them, so they do not wake up again in their old bodies, which are buried as the children buried the bodies of the robins."

He expressed himself very happy, and asked a great many questions, and it seemed as if he had already known of the fact of death. At all events, he now accepted it as the common destiny, without any painful feeling, and it seemed to give new realization to his mother's feeling that her own was indeed nothing but a morbid feeling, and that normal nature did not shrink from death. The subsequent questions were innumerable. I read to him Krummacher's parable of the caterpillar and b.u.t.terfly in the garden of Thirza, after the death of Abel, as it was paraphrased by Mr. Alcott when he read it in his school, in which I was a.s.sisting him at the very time that I was called away to the child's mother. And it was the study I had made of childhood in his school which had enabled me to pursue with so much confidence the method I took with the child, though it was in my own childhood I conceived the plan; and I remember speaking of it to Dr. Channing in 1824, and how much interested he was in the idea, though he told me that in his own case he was indebted to the symbolism of nature, especially the ocean seen from the beach at Newport, for clearing his mind of the effects of the teaching and preaching which he had heard. These grand objects, and later the beauty of some manifestations he had seen of love giving courage and power to the weak, kindled his ideal, and gave form and substance to his consciousness of G.o.d.

For a time there was nothing but delight expressed in the fact of death, the relief from all suffering, the enlargement of life and joy and new knowledge of G.o.d and His ways. At last a little incident showed him the shadow which attends death in this world.

We often went to call on the family of the physician who attended his mother. One day when we went, the Doctor, who was very fond of F., took him into his lap while I was playing with the baby in his mother's arms.

They always called it "baby." I said to Mrs. D., "Has not baby any name?" The mother replied, "His name is Edward." F. looked up at the Doctor with a bright, joyous expression, and said, "Where is your other Edward?" The Doctor's face changed instantaneously; he clasped the child close to him, and said, "Oh, he has gone to his Heavenly Father," with a burst of grief. F. stretched himself back, looked into the agitated face, and said with a look of the greatest concern, "Are you sorry that he has gone to the Heavenly Father?" "Oh, very, very sorry," said the poor father. "Should not you be sorry if he should take away your dear mother?" and putting the child down, he immediately left the room. Mrs.

D. said, "The Doctor has never got over the death of that child, and we never name him in his presence."

I immediately left the house, and we walked some distance in silence, and as I found F. did not incline to speak, I said, "F., did the Doctor look glad when you spoke to him about his other Edward?" He pressed himself close up to me, and said eagerly, "No, no! he looked very sorry.

What made him sorry? Did he not like to have his other Edward with the Heavenly Father?" "Oh, yes! he liked that, but then he wanted to have him in his own arms. You see he cannot see him now, and he wants to kiss him." "Yes," said F., "he hugged me!" I continued: "You see, the Doctor is very strong and well, and I suppose he will live in his body a good many years, and he has Mrs. D. and Julia and the rest, but he wants that other Edward, too, every day of his life." F. replied sympathizingly, "He was large, and white, and bright, and when I go into the sky, I shall look all over to see where he is." I said, after a little while, "Shall you say anything more to the Doctor about his other Edward?" "No, indeed!" said he. "I never shall say another word about him. Do you think I want to make the poor Doctor sorry?" I told his mother, when I got home, of the whole affair, and we agreed that it was well he should see the sad side of death for the survivors.

It was soon a question with F. how we were to live without the body, and he asked me. I told him I did not know exactly how it was to be, but I supposed G.o.d would let new eyes, ears, and whatever limbs we should need, grow out of us, made of the finest stuff like air, which we could not see because it was so delicate, or even feel, as we did the air when it moved, but which souls could use just as they pleased. He said, "I have seen some pictures of souls that had gone out of their bodies, and I did not know before what they were." Surprised, I asked him how they looked. He said, "They were nothing but heads with wings."

The delightful thing was to see the effect of all this earnest prattle upon the mother; and one day, after I had returned from a visit to a friend in the town, she told me she had had a conversation with F. on her own approaching death that was very satisfactory.

She said she had his bread and milk put on a little table opposite her easy-chair, and when he was happily engaged, she said, "F., I think our Heavenly Father will soon take me to Himself." He looked up with an expression of great feeling, and said tenderly: "Do you? Then you will get rid of that poor, sick body, and your cough;" and he added presently, "Perhaps he will give you _wings_!" She said nothing could be likened to the impression of peace and sweetness which these simple words made upon her. Soon after, he said, "But what will be done with your poor old body?" (She said he spoke as if it was of not much importance.) She replied, "Your father and Aunt Lizzy will take it to Cambridge in a carriage, and put it into the ground; and the gra.s.s will grow over the place, and sometimes you can come to the place; and I guess I shall look out of heaven and see you." But in a few minutes he began to cry, and said, "I want to go with you into the sky." She said, "Oh, you have a nice little body, which gives you a great deal of pleasure, and you must stay here with poor, dear father! What would he do when he has no wife any longer, without his little boy to make him happy, and take care of him when he grows old?" After a little more of such remonstrance he said, "Well, I will stay with him!" It was curious that in talking with me he never referred to this subject of his mother's approaching death, which evidently had touched him tenderly, and I did not introduce the subject.

It was also a curious circ.u.mstance, that after this matter of death was, as it were, settled satisfactorily, and the mind of his mother freed from all trouble on the point, _the love of this life_, to which she had hitherto been more than indifferent, sprang up in her with great energy, and she proposed to break up the house, and go to Florida for cure! Her husband and I could not share the hope, but we could not but sympathize in the new joy in life, that she seemed to have received from her now happy child, with whom she had learnt _to live_ in the spirit.

Things were so arranged that she made her husband's father's house, about thirty miles distant, the first goal of her journey. She reached with great fatigue this first stage, and stopped to rest, and never mentioned Florida afterwards. She breathed on another year, during which time I only saw her in weekly visits, having returned to Mr. Alcott's school in Boston. Her disease was not very painful, but so lingering that every trace of her former beauty was lost in the ghastly emaciation.

There were in the house two little cousins, younger than F., taken care of exclusively by a very sweet mother, and this gave him the most desirable social intercourse and play that took the place of our discourses at the right moment, and called into action very sweet traits of character. My weekly visit of a day or two was a great affair to the children. I told them stories, innumerable variations of _The Story without an End_, and of _Pilgrim's Progress_, modified to their infant minds. I always repeated the stories in precisely the same words (which is a great point in telling stories to children, and impresses them on the memory), and they became very familiar with the ends of my paragraphs, and would take them from my lips, and repeat them as a chorus. Thus when I had got Pilgrim laid away in the upper chamber of the House Beautiful, whose white draperies I minutely described, they would all interrupt me, and sing out, "And the name of that chamber was Peace." So of the last words of other paragraphs that I purposely made epigrammatic.

The substantial character of the child's piety and sense of immortality, which I have described as bubbling up at the name _Heavenly_ Father, spoken at the right time, and in the right way, was exhibited unmistakably in his after life, and began to express itself at once in his a.s.sociation with his little cousins, which proved a very timely thing for him, bringing out his moral character by means of what he constantly did to make them happy, and keep them good, but he never said anything to them about the Heavenly Father. That subject seemed reserved for me.

It was amusing to see how fatherly he was to the little one, and he continued this fatherly manner all his after life to all the children with whom he came in contact, and even during his childhood it was singularly unmixed with any tyranny or managing spirit. He would play as they wanted to with them. He seemed to be drawn to children because he could so easily understand their innocence, and make them happy by his companionship, and because he enjoyed _them_.

All his subsequent life he exhibited an exquisite sensibility to beauty, which he continued to accept as the Creator's _smile of consent_; the _very good_ p.r.o.nounced on everything which He had made. In the last part of his mother's life, she became so frightfully emaciated, that it was evidently painful for him to look at her; but he _said_ nothing about it; and it was sweet to see the delicacy with which he tried to conceal this pain from _her_, when he was admitted into the room to see her, which, at length, came to be only in the middle of the day, when she was seated in an easy-chair, with a broad white footstool at her feet. He would come into the room, looking on the floor, and seat himself on the footstool, with his back partly turned to her, and, drawing down her hands, cover them with kisses: he refused, as it were, to recognize her, under that ghastly mask, which, however, did not shut off from his _remembrance_, her former loveliness; for, as soon as she was really dead, and he began to think of her _in heaven_, she became his standard of beauty. During the little more than a year that he continued under my care, "_not_ so beautiful as my mother," or "_as_ beautiful as my mother" were words very frequently in his mouth. As she approached her death, she was so careful lest he should have any of the _shock_ which her own mother's death gave to her, that she readily consented that he should go for the last few days with the other children to stay with a kind neighbor. He was therefore not present at her death; neither was I.

It was an event greatly longed for by herself, at last, and its approach, which she knew before any one else discerned any special change, seemed to gladden her. Her last breath was peaceful; her last words, "Give my love to F."

I told him of the event the morning after the funeral, from which I returned with his father, in the dusk of the evening, calling for the child to go home and sleep with me, which he always was delighted to do.

He was put to bed in the room where his mother had died, and I went in with him, to explain her absence, if he should notice it. But he was tired, and so occupied with my presence, he did _not_,--not even when he woke in the morning. At last, I said to him, "Do you see what room we are in?" He rose up and looked around, and said, "Why, it is my mother's chamber! Where is my mother?" I paused a moment to see if he would divine the truth, and then said, "The dear Heavenly Father has taken her at last!" He fell back on the pillow, with a single exclamation of _not painful wonder_, and a countenance sublime with the mingled expression of awe, love, and joyful satisfaction. The fact of her absent body seemed to be a more palpable proof of the truth of her deathless soul, than even her form and word, which had represented it to his senses. He was "silent, as we grow when feeling most," as if he realized that he was in the presence of the "substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen." You may be sure I respected this sacred silence, which seemed to me to last several minutes, but possibly it was only _one_. At last he said gently, "Was the window open?" I replied, "I don't know; I only know our Heavenly Father, who is everywhere, you know, took her to himself. He does not mind about windows, you know."

"_No, indeed!_ I know that very well," he said, with a little laugh (as if he wondered at his momentary lapse of thought). Soon he asked, "Did He give her a new body right away?" "I do not know anything more about that than _you_ do," I replied; "I only know He will do better things for her than we can think of." "Do you think," said he, "that she looks beautiful as she used to?" but, before I could reply, he suddenly added, "I want to _go_ to my mother. I want to see her _now_," and began to cry.

I kissed him, and began gently to recall the conversation that she had had with him the day she told him she expected soon to leave him; and, after a while, he said spontaneously, as he had done when he talked with her he "would stay with his father to comfort him for the loss of her."

His father told me afterwards, that when he saw _him_, he went over the same ground again, beginning with saying that he wanted to go to her; but when his father represented to him how solitary he should be with no wife or son to show their love to him, F. closed the conversation with the words, "Well, I will stay with you till I grow up" (as if it was quite within his option to do so or not).

Very soon after this I took him away with me to Salem, where he remained in our family for a year or more, I think. My father's family were living at the corner of an old burial ground, two sides of the house being bordered by it. The day we arrived we went directly to my sister Sophia's room, which looked out upon this burial ground. He was immediately attracted to the window by the trees, and exclaimed joyfully, "Oh, Aunt Lizzy, what a beautiful green garden this is! What are those things?" (referring to the tomb stones.) I replied: "That green garden is where people lay away, underground, the _poor old worn-out dead bodies_ of their friends, who are with our Father in Heaven, and those things are called tombstones; they are put there with the names carved on them of the persons whose bodies are buried in those spots." He at once seemed greatly interested and pleased, and became still more so after he had seen some burials; his emotions of joy at the thought of the enfranchised spirits entering on their heavenly life, being tempered with tender sympathy for the bereaved friends in their mourning-robes, whom he sometimes saw weeping at the earthly parting. He was always very anxious to know how the buried ones had died, from what particular sickness or danger they had escaped; and one day when my sister Mary came back from a walk, he joyfully told her that he had found out another way in which souls went to heaven. She, of course, asked him, "What way?" and he said, "Why, sometimes ships that go to sea are driven by the wind against some rocks and broken to pieces, and all the men's bodies are drowned, and they go to heaven through the water."

Another time, he ran to her in great excitement, and said: "Oh, Aunt Mary! I saw a little baby's body buried in the green garden; some carriages came, and there was a hole dug already, and people got out of the carriages, and one man had a little box in his arms in which the baby's body was; and they put some ropes around it, and let it down; and then they filled up the hole with the dirt, and I saw the little baby fly up, fly up, fly up!" and he accompanied the words with a circular gesture of his arm. Whether the subjective conception was so vivid, that it reproduced itself to his imagination in an objective form, as the Sistine Madonna is said to have done to Raphael; or it was what is called "a spiritual manifestation"; it was evidently a reality to him, and no comment was made, except that my sister said, "_I never saw a soul fly up_."

I should say here that this child was not imaginative, and we never saw in him the smallest untruthfulness in speech or act, nor tendency to exaggeration. In this he resembled both his parents. Afterwards, he became something of a scientist, and studied medicine for his profession. He was a good cla.s.sical scholar in college, and before his early death, had completed in ma.n.u.script the history of one of the mechanical arts. I think he was not of a visionary temperament. (See Appendix E.)

His life with us in Salem was perfectly delightful. He had no faults, though a certain pertinacity (which was an expression of inherited firmness of character) sometimes required a little disciplinary conversation, nothing more. I never knew of his being subjected to any punishment, or requiring any, in all his childhood. He had not the usual impetuosity of children; perhaps the effect of his early depression of spirits.

My sister Mary had a day-school in the house, made up of children between six and twelve years of age; he was allowed to have his playthings in the school-room, and loved to listen to her oral instruction of the children in natural history and science, especially in the stories that she told or read to them about human beings, in whom he was always more interested than in animals. I taught him how to read by the word method in _The Story without an End_, a slower and more laborious way both for him and me than the mixed method detailed in my _Kindergarten Guide_, of which I have lately published a primer under the t.i.tle of _After Kindergarten, what?_

But had I then known of Frbel's method of employing childish play, organized by the adult with single aim to intellectual development, I should not have taught him to read so early, but something more profitable; I then shared what Professor Aga.s.siz called "_the American insanity_ of teaching children to read before they have learned the things signified by words," which he, like Frbel, believed would produce habits of mind positively injurious, dropping a veil between the observer and nature, preventing all freshness of thought, and destroying the mind's elasticity and _originality_. But I had not (at that time) presumed to question the time-honored tradition, that _the beginning of education_ was _learning to read_.

When, later, my studies with a great philologist gave me a little light upon the subject, and showed me that English had the misfortune to be written by an inadequate alphabet, whose result was to confuse the phonography entirely, by obscuring the original principle of having but one letter for one sound, and a letter for every different sound, I realized the positive disadvantage of children's being forced through a process which baffles all their natural instincts of cla.s.sification; and it was then I invented a method of separating English words into cla.s.ses, the phonographic ones to be first made familiar, and the exceptions cla.s.sified. Yet I could not be insensible to the unnaturalness of beginning with spending so much of the time of very young children upon this work of the _imperfect mind of man_, as languages are, rather than on the works of Infinite Wisdom. I was therefore well prepared to accept Frbel's method of first sharpening the senses by examination of things that charm children, and of developing the understanding by first making things according to the laws which const.i.tute the mind, and then naming them in all perceptible relations. First let us form a mind which can apprehend nature as the standard of truth, before we undertake to _in_form it with what embodies the confusions and errors of men; as, for instance, in a considerable degree the written English language does. For language stands in the same relation to man as nature does in relation to G.o.d. The eternal word of Truth makes _things_ before it is made flesh. The confusion of tongues was the inevitable consequence of the fall of man out of that communion with G.o.d in which children are born, and our written language is an image of this confusion, especially the English, whose so-called orthography is the most anomalous of all languages; and the acquisition, therefore, ought to be postponed, at least until the understanding is fairly developed by some recognition of so much of the Word of G.o.d as is alive in the things we see and can handle. The time comes when the children can understand that exceptions prove the rule, and then those irregularities and anomalies of English writing may be made even entertaining lessons to children; because if its laws and rules are apprehended first, there is something amusing to them in contradictions of law that so many words seem to be. It is the pleasure in the grotesque; children enjoy the _funny_, as they call it, but it is a different enjoyment from that of the beautiful, and the latter is the highest element for human activity. A predominance of the _funny_ even demoralizes intellectually as well as morally, but it has its own subordinate place in healthy child life.

My little friend had a slate and pencil, and immediately inclined to draw from real objects, but we did not know how to give him any other help than to guess at what were the things he was trying to represent.

If we could not guess, I remember he would blush, and go away, saying he would "_fix it a little_." I had the instinct that he could only be effectually encouraged by success, and I would endeavor to divine what he meant, by looking to see what were the surrounding objects when I saw him drawing, and would point out to him with congratulation any part in which he had at all succeeded, letting the rest go. But without adequate and legitimate guidance he necessarily became discouraged with his failures. What children do not succeed in, becomes distasteful to them, and they turn their attention from what has disappointed them, and thus their natural tastes die, or are starved out. As they have no knowledge of materials, nor judgment in using them, they undertake _the impossible_, and being baffled, lose courage to undertake the possible.

So young artists acc.u.mulate difficulties by their unwise choice of subjects, not realizing the limitations of their own powers. It is the part of the educated kindergartner to supply this want of judgment and a.n.a.lysis until the pupil catches the secret of gradualism and the law of opposites. Frbel's plan of giving the squared slate and paper to ensure straightness of line in children's drawing is like the leading strings by which the mother helps the child to develop his limbs for walking, which cannot be done without his own personal effort. So Frbel's plan of having the kindergartner suggest a symmetrical drawing of lines in opposites, vivifies the sense of symmetry into a thought, whence springs a plan of making still another symmetry. For by suggesting opposites, and then the connecting of them, the child delightedly sees orderly forms that grow under his hands, and feels that he is acting from his own individual personality (which _he is_, though the thought was suggested by the words of another). What he _does_ gives him confidence in his own mind, whose fanciful movement suggests other symmetries; for though fancy is a spontaneous play of the free will among impressions pa.s.sively received, it is amenable to the laws whose exponents are presented to it by nature's works and human suggestion.

F. liked to watch my sister Sophia at her drawing and painting, but its very perfection discouraged efforts on his own part. It is bad not to _do_ really at once what we conceive of ideally. It was only in the moral and religious sphere that we really lived with him, and he was properly educated by us. We always answered all his questions about what we were doing, and how, and why (I wish now I had asked him more questions).

My sister Sophia had a rare talent for talking with children, whose purity and innocence she comprehended by a sympathetic intuition, and to whose imagination her Christian faith gave ample scope, for it was hampered by no human creeds. We had a circle of acquaintances who were only too much inclined to pet him, and who, knowing something of the history of his mind, liked to talk with him. His mother had been very much beloved by this circle, and I used to tell him that _for her_ sake, they cared for and attended to _him_, which interested him immensely, and perhaps prevented his considering himself as a person of too much importance comparatively. He would talk of going to see his "MOTHER'S FRIENDS." If new persons spoke to him kindly, he would ask me immediately if they knew and loved his mother; at all events, the element of personal EGOTISM did not appear, and the affection he at first poured out on me, now freely flowed out in every direction. I remember his saying to me, one day, with an accent of great self-gratulation, "I think I have a great many friends," and in a moment after added, "my mother was so beautiful!" (as if that were the reason of it). A young husband and wife became inmates of our house, and brought a beautiful infant. This was a perennial fountain of delight to F. The singular beauty of the little one was a constant subject of observation. One day he was looking at her, as she lay on her mother's lap, and presently he burst out, "Oh, Ellen, your little bright eyes are shining themselves into a _sun_!" He was equally delighted with the musical sound of her crowing. His ear for sounds was fastidiously delicate. One day my mother was in the garden, looking at some wild flowers which had been brought to her for transplanting. As she looked at them she said to F., "Run into the house, and get my--" He interrupted her eagerly with, "Don't say that ugly _word_! I know what you mean," and he ran into the house, and brought back Bigelow's _Plants around Boston_ (_Bigelow_ was the ugly word). But let me hasten from these details, to redeem my promise of telling you how _prayer_ became a thought of his mind, and his spontaneous practice.

It was very early a question of great interest to his mother, and also to me, whether prayer _would_ become spontaneous with him; that is, whether he would think of speaking to G.o.d _in human words_. His intense realization of G.o.d's _presence_ seemed to be a cause of his _not_ doing so, and I feared to put G.o.d _at a distance_ by suggesting what, in ordinary cases, is a means of bringing Him near. If prayer be defined as a communion of the finite and Infinite, as personal as that of _children_ with earthly parents, _his_ whole conscious life was a prayer; for truly G.o.d was in all his thoughts from the day he first accepted Him so joyfully as the Substance and Giver of _goodness and love_, which involved to the natural logic of his innocent mind the corollary that He was the Giver of everything outward, as well as inward, which gave him any happiness. I did not dare to meddle with the natural evolution of thought in so happy an instance, but watched to learn the true method of life of the little child, as Christ suggested to his disciples to do. One day when his grandmother, who was at the house on a visit, dropped her needle, she called to F., "Come, and look with _your little sharp eyes_ for my needle." He did so, with his usual alacrity in service, and soon found it. Then he ran to me, and said, "When I go into the sky, I shall thank my good Friend for giving me such sharp eyes." I said, "What do you wait so long for?" He gave me a glance of recognition, as it were, and laughed (as if he had been convicted of saying something silly); but he said no more _then_. From that moment, however, he often came to me to say, "When I go into the sky, I shall thank my Heavenly Father for giving me" this or that; and I would always answer him as before, "Why do you _wait_?" which would always bring out the same complete expression of satisfaction on his face, showing that he loved to renew the occasion for my uniform reply, "Why do you wait _till then_?"

On one of these occasions he turned from me, and said very tenderly, "_I thank you, G.o.d_." One day, after he went to Salem, he had been suffering from a bad earache, and my sister had relieved it by putting a little tuft of cotton dipped in arnica into his ear. Then she asked him to go to the window and look out into "the green garden," and she took up a pencil to draw. Very soon he began, "G.o.d, I thank you for making this green garden to put away the dead bodies _in_. G.o.d, I thank you for making these beautiful trees grow out of the ground. G.o.d, I thank you for making all the pretty wild flowers grow." He paused between each complete sentence, and my sister, having a pencil in her hand, wrote down his words till she had covered a sheet of letter paper with his thanksgivings; for he went on naming everything he could think of; and it was quite wonderful to hear the minuteness of his grateful appreciation of life.

One sentence was: "I thank you, G.o.d, for making medicine to put into my ear when it aches." He also thanked G.o.d for his father, and his father's letters to him, for his mother in heaven, for many friends whom he loved, naming them. I hope that sometime I shall find my sister's paper, which I have mislaid with the other memoranda of this interesting psychological observation. The pauses between the thanksgivings became longer and longer, and at last, after one for which he seemed to have searched his inmost mind, in despair of finding anything else, he closed with, "My dear G.o.d, I love you very much."

You will observe that in all this spontaneous act of devotion, there was no _pet.i.tion_. In the fulness of his happy life, and, as I think, in the faith that G.o.d was giving him everything needful, and more, he never thought of _asking_ for anything.

Temptation to wrong-doing had not yet revealed the need that the progressing spirit always feels of _more_ goodness and love, which I had taken care to represent that G.o.d gave whenever the soul acknowledged to itself its need and aspired for more of this, its vital substance. For it is my opinion that prayer should always be for spiritual good only, in order that our religion should be pure from self-seeking, and generously self-forgetting in its aspirations for perfection.

A little while after this incident, my sister was reading to him, and came to a sentence in which were the words "morning and evening prayer."

He immediately stopped her and asked her, "What does that mean, that word _prayer_?" She said, "Many grown up people, when they wake in the morning, and find that G.o.d has taken care of them in the night when they could not take care of themselves, and given them a new day after their good sleep, feel very thankful, and love to tell G.o.d so, just as you did the other day when you thanked G.o.d for so many things; and besides, remembering that there are a good many things they ought to do, and that He gives _the love and goodness_, they like to ask Him beforehand to give them what they shall need _to be good with_ when the time comes to want it; and at night, after they have got through the day, they like to thank Him for all the joys of the day, and they ask Him to take care of them through the night that is coming, when they shall be asleep and cannot take care of themselves; and this loving talk with G.o.d is called the morning and evening prayer." I think she added that when she was little she used to say, when she was going to bed:--

"Now I lay me down to sleep; I pray the Lord my soul to keep; If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take;"

and that was her evening prayer. "I think it is a very good way," said he, "and I mean to do so this very night when I go to bed." And it was true that when he went to bed, he remembered and made a similar thanksgiving to his former one in kind, and closed with this little verse. And again in the morning he began the first thing to thank G.o.d for the new day, etc. Nor did he forget afterwards, night and morning, to give thanks and utter prayers spontaneously, and seemed to enjoy it.

One morning he waked me with his loud singing, and as soon as I opened my eyes, said to me, "Aunt Lizzy, I am _singing_ my morning prayer." I said, "There was a wonderful little shepherd boy once, whose name was David, who loved G.o.d as you do, and who always sang his prayers."

Immediately he wanted to know all about him, and I told him the story of David in his childhood and up to the time he was sent for to sing to King Saul; and I ended with saying that I would read to him some of David's _psalms_ (as these sung prayers were called); and this I did, and the eloquence of the sweet singer of Israel seemed to vivify his idea of the Heavenly Father, and of His connection with the soul within us all and the world without. Especially I tried on him the effect of the Psalm beginning, "The heavens are telling of the glory of G.o.d,"

whose rhythm had charmed my own childhood, even before I fully comprehended it; and he liked to hear it, too. Before this, I had read considerably from the Bible to him, for he had one day said that he wondered how the world began to be in the first place, and I had said: "_Yes_, everybody wonders about that. But there is a book (pointing to the Bible) where one of the first men told about how it seemed to him, and I will read it to you." So I opened the book and began the first chapter of Genesis, without introductory comment. When I came to the words "_And there was light_," he sprang up and shouted, "Directly when He said 'Let there be light,' there _was_ light _directly_!"

I wished Longinus could have heard the confirmation of his great criticism. Immediately he ran into my father's study, which was across the entry, and burst out, "Dr. Peabody, when it was all dark and there was nothing made, G.o.d said, '_Let there be light, and there was light_'

directly! directly!" This was not enough; he ran to find my mother and sister, and again repeated the simply sublime words.

Then he came back to me to hear the rest, and I finished the chapter which he wanted me to read to him again and again, day after day. I read afterwards the parable of Jotham, which he liked to hear very much. I cannot help thinking how much more I might have made of that very parable for his moral culture had I then known of Frbel's _gospel of work_. I can hardly bear to think how stupid I was; the effect of not having had the kindergarten education myself.

But he was too soon taken away from my observation, not without my acquiescence, however; for it was to go to his father, who, I thought, needed his companionship. And as it was at a distance that he lived, and, as afterwards my own life was full of vicissitude for many years, I lost the run of him entirely. There was a mutual misunderstanding between his father and me, for several years, from his thinking I wanted to be free from the care of him, and I thinking he did not desire my personal influence on him, and we were both mistaken, as we found out afterwards. When he went to Harvard College, he came to see me, and the interview was very interesting. He had a sweet, though it had become a dim, remembrance of a happy time with us, succeeded, as he told me, by a _lack-love_ experience of years of a dark, gloomy time at a boarding-school, to which he was sent when he was eight years old, because, as he said, his grandmother thought he ought not to be living with his solitary father at a hotel. But the boarding-school proved more than a heart solitude, as the boys were rough and cruel to him in their unguided play. While he was with me, on the occasion of this call, it happened that my sister Sophia's children came into the room where we were. They had a very vivid idea of him from their mother, she having often spoken of him to them, and telling them of his joy in learning he had a Heavenly Father, when he had never thought or been told of it.

When I said to them, "This is F.," one of them said, "Is this F.? I thought he was a little boy," looking at him wonderingly, surprised to see a grown-up man. I told him they were well acquainted with his childhood. It touched him very much, and the conversation that ensued touching on several things I have told, brought back the old time more distinctively, and he said he should often come to recall it by my help, and to learn more of his mother, whose beautiful face haunted his dreams. But just afterwards I left Boston for some years, and did not see him again until after his return from Vienna, where he went after leaving college, and remained till he had completed his medical studies.

I promised then to show him his mother's letters to me, written in her girlhood, and to tell him how much the early experience of his own childhood had ministered to her a heavenly consolation. But again inexorable circ.u.mstances interfered. He became a practising physician in Worcester, and I went to Concord to live, and we procrastinated a promised visit until at last Death mocked our slow affections. I saw him last wrapped in the flag of his country, for when the war broke out in 1861, nothing would do but he must go to it; and he went as one of the surgeons of the 15th Regiment, which was terribly cut up. For a year and a half he did an incredible amount of work, for he would always have his hospital on the field of battle, and the 15th was in a great many battles, and left but few survivors, most of whom are maimed or halt. He took care of those wounded ones who could not be taken from the battle-field, wrote letters for them, and never took a furlough, as every other officer and surgeon did. In the last letter that he wrote to his father, he said that this year and a half was in one sense the happiest time of his life; for it was the only time when he seemed to be of any use. He was killed at last, walking up through the main street of Fredericksburg, Virginia, in the van of the regiment, as was his wont, and his death was instantaneous. His patriotism and his bravery were the fruits of his piety. Every year his father and I met to decorate his grave until his father's death in 1883-4. He is buried at Mt. Auburn by his mother's side, whose body was removed from the tomb in the old burial ground of Cambridge. I have a photograph of him taken at the same age as his mother when she died,--thirty-one years. It was the year before he went to the war, a drooping head, pensive as if marked for early death. But when I saw him dead, his brow was lifted, his whole countenance had become grand and heroic, and it was plain that he had found his ideal vocation. His funeral was celebrated in the city of Worcester with military honors, the wounded soldiers of his regiment following the hea.r.s.e in carriages, and the sidewalks of the city thronged with the mult.i.tude of spectators. A discourse upon the text, "No man can do more than lay down his life for his friends," was p.r.o.nounced over him at the church, and the beautiful hymn sung, "Nearer my G.o.d to Thee," which seemed to me the most appropriate conceivable, though he had never been far from Him, after he knew a name for Him.

After the funeral his father's relatives and friends gathered together, and we talked of him. I told my recollections of his childhood, and all of them expressed the feeling that the life he had led was in perfect harmony with such an early acquaintance made with the Heavenly Father.

LECTURE VIII.