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).
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):--