CHAPTER VI.

THE NEW COMER.

We may be perverse in our notions, and mistaken in our ways; but there are some great natural blessings which we cannot refuse. I reckon it a great natural blessing that the main events of human life are common to all, and that it is out of the power of man to spoil the privilege and pleasure of them. Birth, love, and death, are beyond the reach of man's perverseness. They come differently to the wise and the foolish, the wicked and the pure: but they come alike to the rich and the poor. The infant finds as warm a bosom in which to nestle in the cottage as in the mansion. The bride and bridegroom know the bliss of being all the world to each other as well in their Sunday walk in the fields as in the park of a royal castle. And when the mourners stand within the enclosure where "rich and poor lie down together," death is the same sad and sweet mystery to all the children of mortality, whether they be elsewhere the lowly or the proud.

It may be said that the coming of the infant is not the same event to all, because some very poor people are heard to speak of it as a misfortune, and if the child dies, to rejoice that the Lord has taken it to himself. It is true that some parents are heard to speak in this way; but I believe that the difference here is not between rich and poor, but between the wise and the foolish,--the trusting and the faithless. I have a right to believe this as long as I see that the hardest-working mother can be as tender and as cheerful as any other, and that the poorest man can be as conscientious a father as the richest. If the parents have been guilty of no fault towards their unborn child; if the child be the offspring of healthful and virtuous parents; and if they are calmly resolved to do all in their power for its good,--to earn its bread, to cherish its health, to open its mind, to nourish its soul, they have as good a right to rejoice in the prospect of its birth as anybody in the world. If they steadily purpose to do their full duty by their child, they may rely upon it that all the powers of nature will help them;--that in a world wrapped round with sweet air, and blessed by sunshine, and abounding with knowledge, the human being can hardly fail of the best ends of life, if set fairly forth on his way by those who are all to him in his helpless years. A doubt of this may be pardoned in parents too hard driven by adversity, who have lost heart, and think that to be poor is to be miserable: but the doubt is not reasonable or religious; and it is likely to be fatal to the child. I need not consider it further: for I write for those who have a high purpose and a high hope in rearing children. Those who despond are unfit for the charge, and are not likely to enter into any consultation about it.

To all who have this high purpose and hope, how interesting and how holy is this expectation of the birth of a human being! The mother is happy, and can wait. The father thinks the time long till he can take his infant in his arms, and lavish his love upon it. If there are already children, they are or should be made, happy by some promise of the new blessing to come. A serious hope it should be made to them, however joyful: a hope to be spoken of only in private seasons of confidence, when parents and children speak to each other of what they feel most deeply,--by the bedsides of the little ones at night, or in the quietest time of the Sunday holiday. A serious hope it should be to all parties; for they should bring into the consideration the duties of labour and self-denial which lie before them, and the seasons of anxiety which they must undergo. Before the parents lie sleepless nights, after days of hard work,--hours and hours of that weary suffering which arises from the wailing of a sick infant: and before the entire household the duty of those self-restraints which are ever due from the stronger to the weaker. Amidst the anticipated joys of an infant's presence, these things are not to be forgotten.

When the child is born, what an event is it in the education of the whole household! According to the use made of it is it a pure blessing, or a cause of pain and sin to some concerned. If it be the first child, there is danger lest it be too engrossing to the young mother. I believe it happens oftener than anybody knows, that the first conjugal discontents follow on the birth of the first child. The young mother trusts too much to her husband's interest in her new treasure being equal to her own;--a thing which the constitution of man's nature, and the arrangements of his business, render impossible. He will love his infant dearly, and sacrifice much for it if he remains, as he ought, his wife's first object. But if she neglects his comfort to indulge in fondling her infant, she is doing wrong to both. If her husband no longer finds, on his return from his business, a clean and quiet fireside, and a wife eager to welcome him, but a litter of baby-things, and a wife too busy up-stairs to come down, or too much engaged with her infant to talk with him and make him comfortable, there is a mischief done which can never be repaired.

And if this infant be not the first, there is another person to be no less carefully considered,--the next youngest. I was early struck by hearing the mother of a large family say, that her pet was always the youngest but one; it was so hard to cease to be the baby! Little children are as jealous of affection as the most enraptured lover; and they are too young to have learned to control their passions, and to be reasonable. A more miserable being can hardly exist than a little creature who, having been accustomed to the tenderness always lavished on the baby,--having spent almost its whole life in its mother's arms, and been the first to be greeted on its father's entrance, finds itself bid to sit on its little stool, or turned over to the maid, or to rough brothers and sisters to be taken care of, while everybody gathers round the baby, to admire and love it. Angry and jealous feelings may grow into dreadful passions in that little breast, if great care be not taken to smooth over the rough passage from babyhood to childhood. If the mother would have this child love and not hate the baby, if she would have peace and not tempest reign in the little heart, she will be very watchful. She will have her eye on the little creature, and call it to help her to take care of the baby. She will keep it at her knee, and show it, with many a tender kiss between, how to make baby smile, how to warm baby's feet; will let it taste whether baby's food be nice, and then peep into the cradle, to see whether baby be asleep. And when baby is asleep, the mother will open her arms to the little helper, and fondle it as of old, and let it be all in all to her, as it used to be. This is a great piece of education to them both, and a lesson in justice to all who stand by.

The addition of a child to the family circle is an event too solemn to be deformed by any falsehood. But few parents have the courage to be truthful with their children as to how the infant comes; a question which their natural curiosity always prompts. The deceptions usually practised are altogether to be reprobated. It is an abominable practice to tell children that the doctor brought the baby, and the like. It is abominable as a lie: and it is worse than useless. Any intelligent child will go on to ask,--or if not to ask, to ponder with excited imagination,--where the doctor found it, and so on; and its attention will be piqued, and its mind injuriously set to work, where a few serious words of simple but carefully expressed truth, would have satisfied it entirely. The child must, sooner or later, awaken to an understanding of the subject; and it is no more difficult to impress him with a sense of decency about this, than about other things, that a well trained child never speaks of, but to its mother in private. The natural question once truthfully answered, the little mind is at rest, and free for the much stronger interests which are passing before its eyes.

The first month of an infant's life is usually a season of great moral enjoyment to the household. Everybody is disposed to bear and to do everything cheerfully for the sake of the new blessing. The father does not mind the discomforts of the time of his wife's absence from the table and the fireside, and makes himself by turns the nurse and the playfellow, to carry the children well through it. If Granny be there, and not able to do much in the house, she gathers the little ones about her chair, and tells them longer stories than ever before, to keep them quiet. The children try with all their might to be quiet; and even the little two-year-old one struggles not to cry for company when baby cries, and learns a lesson in self-restraint. They look with respect on the maid or the nurse when they find that she has been up in the night, tending mother and baby, and that she looks as cheerful in the morning as if she had had good rest. And when they are permitted to study the baby, and to see how it jerks its little limbs about, and does not see anything they want it to see, and takes no notice of anything they say to it; and when they hear that their great strong father, so wise and so clever about his business, was once just such a helpless little creature as this, they learn to reverence this feeble infant, and one another, and themselves, and their hearts are very full of feelings which they cannot speak. I well remember that the strongest feelings I ever entertained towards any human being were towards a sister born when I was nine years old. I doubt whether any event in my life ever exerted so strong an educational influence over me as her birth. The emotions excited in me were overwhelming for above two years; and I recal them as vividly as ever now when I see her with a child of her own in her arms. I threw myself on my knees many times in a day, to thank God that he permitted me to see the growth of a human being from the beginning. I leaped from my bed gaily every morning as this thought beamed upon me with the morning light. I learnt all my lessons without missing a word for many months, that I might be worthy to watch her in the nursery during my play-hours. I used to sit on a stool opposite to her as she was asleep, with a Bible on my knees, trying to make out how a creature like this might rise "from strength to strength," till it became like Christ. My great pain was, (and it was truly at times a despair,) to think what a work lay before this thoughtless little being. I could not see how she was to learn to walk with such soft and pretty limbs: but the talking was the despair. I fancied that she would have to learn every word separately, as I learned my French vocabulary; and I looked at the big Johnson's Dictionary till I could not bear to think about it. If I, at nine years old, found it so hard to learn through a small book like that Vocabulary, what would it be to her to begin at two years old such a big one as that! Many a time I feared that she never could possibly learn to speak. And when I thought of all the trees and plants, and all the stars, and all the human faces she must learn, to say nothing of lessons,--I was dreadfully oppressed, and almost wished she had never been born. Then followed the relief of finding that walking came of itself--step by step; and then, that talking came of itself--word by word at first, and then many new words in a day. Never did I feel a relief like this, when the dread of this mighty task was changed into amusement at her funny use of words, and droll mistakes about them. This taught me the lesson, never since forgotten, that a way always lies open before us, for all that it is necessary for us to do, however impossible and terrible it may appear beforehand. I felt that if an infant could learn to speak, nothing is to be despaired of from human powers, exerted according to Nature's laws. Then followed the anguish of her childish illnesses--the misery of her wailing after vaccination, when I could neither bear to stay in the nursery nor to keep away from her; and the terror of the back-stairs, and of her falls, when she found her feet; and the joy of her glee when she first knew the sunshine, and the flowers, and the opening spring; and the shame if she did anything rude, and the glory when she did anything right and sweet. The early life of that child was to me a long course of intense emotions which, I am certain, have constituted the most important part of my education. I speak openly of them here, because I am bound to tell the best I know about Household Education; and on that, as on most subjects, the best we have to tell is our own experience. And I tell it the more readily because I am certain that my parents had scarcely any idea of the passions and emotions that were working within me, through my own unconsciousness of them at the time, and the natural modesty which makes children conceal the strongest and deepest of their feelings: and it may be well to give parents a hint that more is passing in the hearts of their children, on occasion of the gift of a new soul to the family circle, than the ingenuous mind can recognise for itself, or knows how to confide.