Heaven lies about us in our infancy.—Wordsworth.

Die Kindheit ist ein Augenblick Gottes.—Achim v. Arnim.

Wahre dir den Kindersinn,
Kindheit blÜht in Liebe bin,
Kinderzeit ist heil'ge Zeit,
Heidenkindheit—Christenheit.
—B. Goltz.

Happy those early days, when I Shined in my angel infancy.
—Henry Vaughan.

Childhood shall be all divine.—B. W. Proctor.

But Heaven is kind, and therefore all possess,
Once in their life, fair Eden's simpleness.—H. Coleridge.

But to the couch where childhood lies,
A more delicious trance is given,
Lit up by rays from seraph eyes,
And glimpses of remembered heaven.—W. M. Praed.

O for boyhood's time of June,
Crowding years in one brief moon!—Whittier.

Golden Age.

The English word world, as the Anglo-Saxon weorold, Icelandic verÖld, and Old High German weralt indicate, signified originally "age of man," or "course of man's life," and in the mind of the folk the life of the world and the life of man have run about the same course. By common consent the golden age of both was at the beginning, ab ovo. With Wordsworth, unlettered thousands have thought:—

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!"

Die Kindheit ist ein Augenblick Gottes, "childhood is a moment of God," said Achim Ton Arnim, and Hartley Coleridge expresses the same idea in other words:—

"But Heaven is kind, and therefore all possess,
Once in their life, fair Eden's simpleness."

This belief in the golden age of childhood,—die heilige Kinderzeit, the heaven of infancy,—is ancient and modern, world-wide, shared in alike by primitive savage and nineteenth-century philosopher. The peasant of Brittany thinks that children preserve their primal purity up to the seventh year of their age, and, if they die before then, go straight to heaven (174. 141), and the great Chinese philosopher, linking together, as others have done since his time, the genius and the child, declared that a man is great only as he preserves the pure ideas of his childhood, while Coleridge, in like fashion tells us: "Genius is the power of carrying the feelings of childhood into the power of manhood."

Everywhere we hear the same refrain:—

"Aus der Jugendzeit, aus der Jugendzeit,
Klingt ein Lied immerdar;
O wie liegt so weit, o wie liegt so weit,
Was mein einst war!"

The Paradise that man lost, the Eden from which he has been driven, is not the God-planted Garden by the banks of Euphrates, but the "happy days of angel infancy," and "boyhood's time of June," the childhood out of which in the fierce struggle—for existence the race has rudely grown, and back to which, for its true salvation, it must learn to make its way again. As he, who was at once genius and child, said, nearly twenty centuries ago: "Except ye turn and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven."

When we speak of "the halcyon days of childhood," we recall an ancient myth, telling how, in an age when even more than now "all Nature loved a lover," even the gods watched over the loves of Ceyx and Halcyone. Ever since the kingfisher has been regarded as the emblem, of lasting fidelity in love. As Ebers aptly puts it: "Is there anywhere a sweeter legend than that of the Halcyons, the ice-birds who love each other so tenderly that, when the male becomes enfeebled by age, his mate carries him on her outspread wings whithersoever he wills; and the gods desiring to reward such faithful love cause the sun to shine more kindly, and still the winds and waves on the 'Halcyon Days' during which these birds are building their nests and brooding over their young" (390. II. 269).

Of a special paradise for infants, something has been said elsewhere. Of Srahmanadzi, the other world, the natives of Ashanti say: "There an old man becomes young, a young man a boy, and a boy an infant. They grow and become old. But age does not carry with it any diminution of strength or wasting of body. When they reach the prime of life, they remain so, and never change more" (438. 157).

The Kalmucks believe that some time in the future "each child will speak immediately after its birth, and the next day be capable of undertaking its own management" (518. I. 427). But that blissful day is far off, and the infant human still needs the overshadowing of the gods to usher him into the real world of life.

Guardian Angels and Deities.

Christ, speaking his memorable words about little children to those who had inquired who was greatest in the kingdom of heaven, uttered the warning: "See that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven." In the hagiology of the Christian churches, and in the folk-lore of modern Europe, the idea contained in our familiar expression "guardian angel" has a firm hold; by celestial watchers and protectors the steps of the infant are upheld, and his mind guided, until he reaches maturity, and even then the guardian spirit often lingers to guide the favoured being through all the years of his life (191. 8). The natives of Ashanti believe that special spirits watch over girls until they are married, and in China there is a special mother-goddess who guards and protects childhood.

Walter Savage Landor has said:—

"Around the child bend all the three
Sweet Graces,—Faith, Hope, Charity,"

and the "three Fates" of classic antiquity, the three Norns of Scandinavian mythology, the three SudiÊicky or fate-goddesses of the Czechs of Bohemia, the three fate- and birth-goddesses of the other Slavonic peoples, the three [Greek: Moirai] of Modern Greece, the three Phatite of Albania, the three white ladies, three virgins, three Mary's, etc., of German legend of to-day, have woven about them a wealth of quaint and curious lore (326. I. 42-47).

The survival of the old heathen belief alongside the Christian is often seen, as, e.g., at Palermo, in Sicily, where "the mother, when she lifts the child out of the cradle, says aloud: 'Nuome di Dio, In God's name,' but quickly adds sotto voce: 'Cu licenzi, signuri mui, By your leave, Ladies.'" The reference is to the "three strange ladies," representing the three Fates, who preside over the destiny of human beings.

Ploss has discussed at length the goddesses of child-birth and infancy, and exhibited their relations to the growing, fertilizing, regenerative powers of nature, especially the earth, sun, moon, etc.; the Hindu Bhavani (moon-goddess); the Persian Anahita; the Assyrian Belit, the spouse of Bel; the Phoenician Astarte; the Egyptian Isis; the Etruscan Mater matuta; the Greek Hera Eileithyia, Artemis,; the Roman Diana, Lucina, Juno; the Phrygian Cybele; the Germanic Freia, Holla, Gude, Harke; the Slavonic Siwa, Libussa, Zlata Baba ("the golden woman"); the ancient Mexican Itzcuinam, Yohmaltcitl, Tezistecatl; the Chibchan rainbow-goddess Cuchavira; the Japanese Kojasi Kwanon, and hundreds more.

The number of gods and goddesses presiding over motherhood and childhood is legion; in every land divine beings hover about the infant human to protect it and assure the perpetuity of the race. In ancient Rome, besides the divinities who were connected with generation, the embryo, etc., we find, among others, the following tutelary deities of childhood:—

Parca or Partula, the goddess of child-birth; Diespiter, the god who brings the infant to the light of day; Opis, the divinity who takes the infant from within the bosom of mother-earth; Vaticanus, the god who opens the child's mouth in crying; Cunina, the protectress of the cradle and its contents; Rumina, the goddess of the teat or breast; Ossipaga, the goddess who hardens and solidifies the bones of little children; Carna, the goddess who strengthens the flesh of little children; Diva potina, the goddess of the drink of children; Diva edusa, the goddess of the food of children; Cuba, the goddess of the sleep of the child; Levana, the goddess who lifts the child from the earth; Statanus, the god, and Dea Statina, the goddess, of the child's standing; Fabulinus, the god of the child's speech; Abeona and Adiona, the protectresses of the child in its goings out and its comings in; Deus catus pater, the father-god who "sharpens" the wits of children; Dea mens, the goddess of the child's mind; Minerva, the goddess who is the giver of memory to the child; Numeria, the goddess who teaches the child to count; Voleta, the goddess, and Volumnus the god, of will or wishing; Venilia, the goddess of hope, of "things to come"; Deus conus, the god of counsel, the counsel-giver; Peragenor or Agenona, the deity of the child's action; Camna, the goddess who teaches the child to sing, etc. (398.188).

Here the child is overshadowed, watched over, taught and instructed by the heavenly powers:—

"But to the couch where childhood lies
A more delicious trance is given,
Lit up by rays from seraph eyes,
And glimpses of remembered heaven."

In line with the poet's thought, though of a ruder mould, is the belief of the Iroquois Indians recorded by Mrs. Smith: "When a living nursing child is taken out at night, the mother takes a pinch of white ashes and rubs it on the face of the child so that the spirits will not trouble, because they say that a child still continues to hold intercourse with the spirit-world whence it so recently came" (534. 69).

Birth-Myths.

President Hall has treated of "The Contents of Children's Minds on Entering School" (252), but we yet lack a like elaborate and suggestive study of "The Contents of Parents' Minds on Entering the Nursery." We owe to the excellent investigation carried on by Principal Russell and his colleagues at the State Normal School in Worcester, Mass., "Some Records of the Thoughts and Reasonings of Children" (194), and President Hall has written about "Children's Lies" (252a), but we are still without a correspondingly accurate and extensive compilation of "The Thoughts and Reasonings of Parents," and a plain, unbiassed register of the "white lies" and equivoques, the fictions and epigrammatic myths, with which parents are wont to answer, or attempt to answer, the manifold questions of their tender offspring. From time immemorial the communication between parent (and nurse) and child, between the old of both sexes and little children, far from being yea and nay, has been cast in the mould of the advice given in the German quatrain:—

"Ja haltet die Aequivocabula nur fest,
Sind sie doch das einzige Mittel,
Dem Kind die Wahrheit zu bergen und doch
Zu brauchen den richtigen Titel."

["Hold fast to the words that we equivoques call;
For they are indeed the only safe way
To keep from the children the truth away,
Yet use the right name after all."]

Around the birth of man centres a great cycle of fiction and myth. The folk-lore respecting the provenience of children may be divided into two categories. The first is represented by our "the doctor brought it," "God sent it," and the "van Moor" of the peasantry of North Friesland, which may signify either "from the moor," or "from mother." The second consists of renascent myths of bygone ages, distorted, sometimes, it is true, and recast. As men, in the dim, prehistoric past, ascribed to their first progenitors a celestial, a terrestrial, a subterranean, a subaqueous origin, a coming into being from animals, birds, insects, trees, plants, rocks, stones, etc.,—for all were then akin,—so, after long centuries have rolled by, father, mother, nurse, older brother or sister, speaking of the little one in whom they see their stock renewed, or their kinship widened, resurrect and regild the old fables and rejuvenate and reanimate the lore that lay sunk beneath the threshold of racial consciousness. Once more "the child is father of the man"; his course begins from that same spring whence the first races of men had their remotest origins. George Macdonald, in the first lines of his poem on "Baby" (337. 182):—

"Where did you come from, baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into here,"

has expressed a truth of folk-lore, for there is scarcely a place in the "everywhere" whence the children have not been fabled to come. Children are said to come from heaven (Germany, England, America, etc.); from the sea (Denmark); from lakes, ponds, rivers (Germany, Austria, Japan); from moors and sand-hills (northeastern Germany); from gardens (China); from under the cabbage-leaves (Brittany, Alsace), or the parsley-bed (England); from sacred or hollow trees, such as the ash, linden, beech, oak, etc. (Germany, Austria); from inside or from underneath rocks and stones (northeastern Germany, Switzerland, Bohemia, etc.). It is worthy of note how the topography of the country, its physiographic character, affects these beliefs, which change with hill and plain, with moor and meadow, seashore and inland district. The details of these birth-myths may be read in Ploss (326. I. 2), Schell (343), Sundermann (366). Specially interesting are the Kindersee ("child-lake"), Kinderbaum ("child-tree"), and Kinderbrunnen ("child-fountain") of the Teutonic lands,—offering analogies with the "Tree of Life" and the "Fountain of Eternal Youth" of other ages and peoples; the Titistein, or "little children's stone," and the Kindertruog ("child's trough") of Switzerland, and the "stork-stones" of North Germany.

Dr. Haas, in his interesting little volume of folk-lore from the island of RÜgen, in the Baltic, records some curious tales about the birth of children. The following practice of the children in that portion of Germany is significant: "Little white and black smooth stones, found on the shore, are called 'stork-stones.' These the children are wont to throw backwards over their heads, asking, at the same time, the stork to bring them a little brother or sister" (466 a. 144). This recalls vividly the old Greek deluge-myth, in which we are told, that, after the Flood, Deucalion was ordered to cast behind him the "bones of his mother." This he interpreted to mean the "stones," which seemed, as it were, the "bones" of "mother-earth." So he and his wife Pyrrha picked up some stones from the ground and cast them over their shoulders, whereupon those thrown by Deucalion became men, those thrown by Pyrrha, women. Here belongs, also, perhaps, the Wallachian custom, mentioned by Mr. Sessions (who thinks it was "probably to keep evil spirits away"), in accordance with which "when a child is born every one present throws a stone behind him."

On the island of RÜgen erratic blocks on the seashore are called Adeborsteine, "stork-stones," and on such a rock or boulder near Wrek in Wittow, Dr. Haas says "the stork is said to dry the little children, after he has fetched them out of the sea, before he brings them to the mothers. The latter point out these blocks to their little sons and daughters, telling them how once they were laid upon them by the stork to get dry." The great blocks of granite that lie scattered on the coast of Jasmund are termed Schwansteine, "swan-stones," and, according to nursery-legend, the children to be born are shut up in them. When a sister or brother asks: "Where did the little swan-child"—for so babies are called—"come from?" the mother replies: "From the swan-stone. It was opened with a key, and a little swan-child taken out." The term "swan-child" is general in this region, and Dr. Haas is inclined to think that the swan-myth is older than the stork-myth (466 a. 143, 144).

Curious indeed is the belief of the Hidatsa Indians, as reported by Dr. Matthews, in the "Makadistati, or house of infants." This is described as "a cavern near Knife River, which, they supposed, extended far into the earth, but whose entrance was only a span wide. It was resorted to by the childless husband or the barren wife. There are those among them who imagine that in some way or other their children come from the Makadistati; and marks of contusion on an infant, arising from tight swaddling or other causes, are gravely attributed to kicks received from his former comrades when he was ejected from his subterranean home" (433. 516).

In Hesse, Germany, there is a children's song (326. I. 9):—

Bimbam, GlÖckchen,
Da unten steht ein StÖckchen,
Da oben steht ein golden Haus,
Da gucken viele schÖne Kinder raus.

The current belief in that part of Europe is that "unborn children live in a very beautiful dwelling, for so long as children are no year old and have not yet looked into a mirror, everything that comes before their eyes appears to be gold." Here folk-thought makes the beginnings of human life a real golden age. They are Midases of the eye, not of the touch.

Children's Questions and Parents' Answers.

Another interesting class of "parents' lies" consists in the replies to, or comments upon, the questionings and remarks of children about the ordinary affairs of life. The following examples, selected from Dirksen's studies of East-Frisian Proverbs, will serve to indicate the general nature and extent of these.

1. When a little child says, "I am hungry," the mother sometimes answers, "Eat some salt, and then you will be thirsty, too."

2. When a child, seeing its mother drink tea or coffee, says, "I'm thirsty," the answer may be, "If you're thirsty, go to Jack ter Host; there's a cow in the stall, go sit under it and drink." Some of the variants of this locution are expressed in very coarse language (431. I. 22).

3. If a child asks, when it sees that its parent is going out, "Am I not going, too?" the answer is, "You are going along, where nobody has gone, to Poodle's wedding," or "You are going along on Stay-here's cart." A third locution is, "You are going along to the KÜkendell fair" (KÜkendell being a part of Meiderich, where a fair has never been held). In Oldenburg the answer is: "You shall go along on Jack-stay-at-home's (JanblievtohÛs) cart." Sometimes the child is quieted by being told, "I'll bring you back a little silver nothing (enn silwer Nickske)" (431. I. 33).

4. If, when he is given a slice of bread, he asks for a thinner one, the mother may remark, "Thick pieces make fat bodies" (431. I. 35).

5. When some one says in the hearing of the father or mother of a child that it ought not to have a certain apple, a certain article of clothing, or the like, the answer is, "That is no illegitimate child." The locution is based upon the fact that illegitimate children do not enjoy the same rights and privileges as those born in wedlock (431. I. 42).

6. Of children's toys and playthings it is sometimes said, when they are very fragile, "They will last from twelve o'clock till midday" (431.1.43).

7. When any one praises her child in the presence of the mother, the latter says, "It's a good child when asleep" (431. I. 51).

8. In the winter-time, when the child asks its mother for an apple, the latter may reply, "the apples are piping in the tree," meaning that there are no longer any apples on the tree, but the sparrows are sitting there, crying and lamenting. In Meiderich the locution is "Apples have golden stems," i.e. they are rare and dear in winter-time (431. I. 75).

9. When the child says, "I can't sit down," the mother may remark, "Come and sit on my thumb; nobody has ever fallen off it" (i.e. because no one has ever tried to sit on it) (431. I. 92).

10. When a lazy child, about to be sent out upon an errand, protests that it does not know where the person to whom the message is to be sent lives, and consequently cannot do the errand, the mother remarks threateningly, "I'll show where Abraham ground the mustard," i.e. "I give you a good thrashing, till the tears come into your eyes (as when grinding mustard)" (431. I. 105).

11. When a child complains that a sister or brother has done something to hurt him, the mother's answer is, "Look out! He shall have water in the cabbage, and go barefoot to bed" (431. I. 106).

12. Sometimes their parents or elders turn to children and ask them "if they would like to be shown the Bremen geese." If the child says yes, he is seized by the ears and head with both hands and lifted off the ground. In some parts of Germany this is called "showing Rome," and there are variants of the practice in other lands (431. II. 14).

13. When a child complains of a sore in its eye, or on its neck, the answer is: "That will get well before you are a great-grandmother" (431. II. 50).

14. When one child asks for one thing and another for something else, the mother exclaims petulantly, "One calls out 'lime,' the other 'stones.'" The reference is to the confusion of tongues at Babel, which is assumed to have been of such a nature that one man would call out "lime," and another "stones" (431. II. 53).

15. When a child asks for half a slice of bread instead of a whole one, the mother may say, "Who doesn't like a whole, doesn't like a half either" (431. II. 43).

16. When a child says, "That is my place, I sat there," the reply is, "You have no place; your place is in the churchyard" (i.e. a grave) (431. II. 76).

When the child says "I will," the mother says threateningly, "Your 'will' is in your mother's pocket." It is in her pocket that she carries the rope for whipping the child. Another locution is, "Your will is in the corner" (i.e. the corner of the room in which stands the broomstick) (431. II. 81).

These specimens of the interchange of courtesies between the child and its parent or nurse might be paralleled from our own language; indeed, many of the correspondences will suggest themselves at once. The deceits practised in the Golden Age of childhood resemble those practised by the gods in the Golden Age of the world, when divine beings walked the earth and had intercourse with the sons and daughters of men.

"Painted Devils."

Even as the serpent marred the Eden of which the sacred legends of the Semites tell, so in the folk-thought does some evil sprite or phantom ever and anon intrude itself in the Paradise of childhood and seek its ruin.

Shakespeare has well said:—

"Tis the eye of childhood
That fears a painted devil,"

and the chronicle of the "painted devils," bogies, scarecrows, et id genus omne, is a long one, whose many chapters may be read in Ploss, Hartland, Henderson, Gregor, etc. Some of the "devils" are mild and almost gentlemen, like their lord and master at times; others are fierce, cruel, and bloodthirsty; their number is almost infinite, and they have the forms of women as well as of men.

Over a large portion of western Europe is found the nursery story of the "Sand-Man," who causes children to become drowsy and sleepy; "the sand-man is coming, the sand-man has put dust in your eyes," are some of the sayings in use. By and by the child gets "so fast asleep that one eye does not see the other," as the Frisian proverb puts it. When, on a cold winter day, her little boy would go out without his warm mittens on, the East Frisian mother says, warningly: De Fingerbiter is buten, "the Finger-biter is outside."

Among the formidable evil spirits who war against or torment the child and its mother are the Hebrew Lilith, the long-haired night-flier; the Greek Strigalai, old and ugly owl-women; the Roman Caprimulgus, the nightly goat-milker and child-killer, and the wood-god Silvanus; the Coptic Berselia; the Hungarian "water-man," or "water-woman," who changes children for criples or demons; the Moravian Vestice, or "wild woman," able to take the form of any animal, who steals away children at the breast, and substitutes changelings for them; the Bohemian Polednice, or "noon-lady," who roams around only at noon, and substitutes changelings for real children; the Lithuanian and Old Prussian Laume, a child-stealer, whose breast is the thunderbolt, and whose girdle is the rainbow; the Servian Wjeschtitza, or witches, who take on the form of an insect, and eat up children at night; the Russian "midnight spirit," who robs children of rest and sleep; the Wendish "Old mountain-woman"; the German (Brunswick) "corn-woman," who makes off with little children looking for flowers in the fields; the RÖggenmuhme ( "rye-aunt"), the Tremsemutter, who walks about in the cornfields; the Katzenveit, a wood spirit, and a score of bogies called Popel, Popelmann, Popanz, Butz, etc.; the Scotch "Boo Man," "Bogie Man," "Jenny wi' the Airn Teeth," "Jenny wi' the lang Pock "; the English and American bogies, goblins, ogres, ogresses, witches, and the like; besides, common to all peoples, a host of werwolves and vampires, giants and dwarfs, witches, ogres, ogresses, fairies, evil spirits of air, water, land, inimical to childhood and destructive of its peace and enjoyment. The names, lineage, and exploits of these may be read in Ploss, Grimm, Hartland, etc.

In the time of the Crusades, Richard Cur de Lion, the hero-king of England, became so renowned among the Saracens that (Gibbon informs us) his name was used by mothers and nurses to quiet their infants, and other historical characters before and after him served to like purpose. To the children of Rome in her later days, Attila, the great Hun, was such a bogy, as was Narses, the Byzantian general (d. 568 A.D.), to the Assyrian children. Bogies also were Matthias Corvinus (d. 1490 A.D.), the Hungarian king and general, to the Turks; Tamerlane (Timur), the great Mongolian conqueror (d. 1405 A.D.), to the Persians; and Bonaparte, at the close of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, in various parts of the continent of Europe. These, and other historical characters have, in part, taken the place of the giants and bogies of old, some of whom, however, linger, even yet, in the highest civilizations, together with fabulous animals (reminiscent of stern reality in primitive times), with which, less seriously than in the lands of the eastern world, childhood is threatened and cowed into submission.

The Ponka Indian mothers tell their children that if they do not behave themselves the IndaciÑga (a hairy monster shaped like a human being, that hoots like an owl) will get them; the Omaha bogy is Icibaji; a Dakota child-stealer and bogy is AÑungite or "Two Faces" (433. 386, 473). With the Kootenay Indians, of south-eastern British Columbia, the owl is the bogy with which children are frightened into good behaviour, the common saying of mothers, when their children are troublesome, being, "If you are not quiet, I'll give you to the owl" (203). Longfellow, in his Hiawatha, speaks of one of the bogies of the eastern Indians:—

"Thus the wrinkled old Nokomis
Nursed the little Hiawatha,
Rooked him in his linden cradle,
Stilled his fretful wail by saying,
'Hush! the naked bear will get thee!'"

Among the Nipissing Algonkian Indians, koko is a child-word for any terrible being; the mothers say to their children, "beware of the koko." Champlain and Lescarbot, the early chroniclers of Canada, mention a terrible creature (concerning which tales were told to frighten children) called gougou, supposed to dwell on an island in the Baie des Chaleurs (200. 239). Among the bogies of the Mayas of Yucatan, Dr. Brinton mentions: the balams (giant beings of the night), who carry off children; the culcalkin, or "neckless priest"; besides giants and witches galore (411. 174, 177).

Among the Gualala Indians of California, we find the "devil-dance," which Powers compares to the haberfeldtreiben of the Bavarian peasants,—an institution got up for the purpose of frightening the women and children, and keeping them in order. While the ordinary dances are going on, there suddenly stalks forth "an ugly apparition in the shape of a man, wearing a feather mantle on his back, reaching from the arm-pits down to the mid-thighs, zebra-painted on his breast and legs with black stripes, bear-skin shako on his head, and his arms stretched out at full length along a staff passing behind his neck. Accoutred in this harlequin rig, he dashes at the squaws, capering, dancing, whooping; and they and the children flee for life, keeping several hundred yards between him and themselves." It is believed that, if they were even to touch his stick, their children would die (519. 194).

Among the Patwin, Nishinam, and Pomo Indians, somewhat similar practices are in vogue (519. 157, 160, 225). From the golden age of childhood, with its divinities and its demons, we may now pass to the consideration of more special topics concerning the young of the races of men.