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Deaths Of Little Children, The
The Deaths Of Little Children
Introductory Note
James Henry Leigh Hunt (1784-1859) was the son of a clergyman from the
West Indies. Like Lamb and Coleridge, he was educated at Christ`s Hospital in
London, and began writing poetry while still a boy. He attracted attention
early by his theatrical criticisms; and in 1808 he joined his brother in
founding a weekly newspaper, the "Examiner." During the thirteen years for
which he contributed to this paper he exerted a wholesome influence in
journalism, raising the tone of the press, showing great independence and
tolerance, and fighting vigorously for liberal principles. He earned the
distinction of two years` imprisonment for telling plain truths about the
Prince Regent; and his prosecution by the Government made him many
distinguished friends. Some years later he went to Italy to join Shelley and
Byron in the establishment of a new magazine; and it was on returning from
Leghorn, where he had gone to meet Hunt, that Shelley was drowned. The new
magazine was soon abandoned, Hunt returned to England, engaged in various
periodical and other literary enterprises from which he seldom earned enough
to meet his expenses, and struggled on cheerfully and courageously to the age
of seventy-five.
Hunt`s poetry is pretty, fanciful, and musical, but, with the exception
of one or two pieces, is now little read. Much of his prose work is merely
highly-toned journalism, the interest of which has passed with its occasion.
But among his familiar essays, from which the paper here printed is taken,
there are many little masterpieces, suffused with his cheerful optimistic
spirit, and expressed always gracefully and sometimes exquisitely. "No man,"
says James Russell Lowell, "has ever understood the delicacies and luxuries of
language better than he; and his thoughts often have all the rounded grace and
shifting luster of a dove`s neck. . . . He was as pure-minded a man as ever
lived, and a critic whose subtlety of discrimination and whose soundness of
judgment, supported as it was on a broad basis of truly liberal scholarship,
have hardly yet won fitting appreciation."
The Deaths Of Little Children
A Grecian philosopher being asked why he wept for the death of his son,
since the sorrow was in vain, replied, "I weep on that account." And his
answer became his wisdom. It is only for sophists to contend that we, whose
eyes contain the fountains of tears, need never give way to them. It would be
unwise not to do so on some occasions. Sorrow unlocks them in her balmy moods.
The first bursts may be bitter and overwhelming; but the soil on which they
pour would be worse without them. They refresh the fever of the soul - the dry
misery which parches the countenance into furrows, and renders us liable to
our most terrible "flesh-quakes."
There are sorrows, it is true, so great, that to give them some of the
ordinary vents is to run a hazard of being overthrown. These we must rather
strengthen ourselves to resist, or bow quietly and drily down, in order to let
them pass over us, as the traveller does the wind of the desert. But where we
feel that tears would relieve us, it is false philosophy to deny ourselves at
least that first refreshment; and it is always false consolation to tell
people that because they cannot help a thing, they are not to mind it. The
true way is, to let them grapple with the unavoidable sorrow, and try to win
it into gentleness by a reasonable yielding. There are griefs so gentle in
their very nature that it would be worse than false heroism to refuse them a
tear. Of this kind are the deaths of infants. Particular circumstances may
render it more or less advisable to indulge in grief for the loss of a little
child; but, in general, parents should be no more advised to repress their
first tears on such an occasion, than to repress their smiles towards a child
surviving, or to indulge in any other sympathy. It is an appeal to the same
gentle tenderness; and such appeals are never made in vain. The end of them is
an acquittal from the harsher bonds of affliction - from the typing down of
the spirit to one melancholy idea.
It is the nature of tears of this kind, however strongly they may gush
forth, to run into quiet waters at last. We cannot easily, for the whole
course of our lives, think with pain of any good and kind person whom we have
lost. It is the divine nature of their qualities to conquer pain and death
itself; to turn the memory of them into pleasure; to survive with a placid
aspect in our imaginations. We are writing at this moment just opposite a spot
which contains the grave of one inexpressibly dear to us. We see from our
window the trees about it, and the church spire. The green fields lie around.
The clouds are travelling overhead, alternately taking away the sunshine and
restoring it. The vernal winds, piping of the flowery summer-time, are
nevertheless calling to mind the far-distant and dangerous ocean, which the
heart that lies in that grave had many reasons to think of. And yet the sight
of this spot does not give us pain. So far from it, it is the existence of
that grave which doubles every charm of the spot; which links the pleasures of
our childhood and manhood together; which puts a hushing tenderness in the
winds, and a patient joy upon the landscape; which seems to unite heaven and
earth, mortality and immortality, the grass of the tomb and the grass of the
green field; and gives a more maternal aspect to the whole kindness of nature.
It does not hinder gaiety itself. Happiness was what its tenant, through all
her troubles, would have diffused. To diffuse happiness, and to enjoy it, is
not only carrying on her wishes, but realising her hopes; and gaiety, freed
from its only pollutions, malignity and want of sympathy, is but a child
playing about the knees of its mother.
The remembered innocence and endearments of a child stand us instead of
virtues that have died older. Children have not exercised the voluntary
offices of friendship; they have not chosen to be kind and good to us; nor
stood by us, from conscious will, in the hour of adversity. But they have
shared their pleasures and pains with us as well as they could; the
interchange of good offices between us has, of necessity, been less mingled
with the troubles of the world; the sorrow arising from their death is the
only one which we can associate with their memories. These are happy thoughts
that cannot die. Our loss may always render them pensive; but they will not
always be painful. It is a part of the benignity of Nature that pain does not
survive like pleasure, at any time, much less where the cause of it is an
innocent one. The smile will remain reflected by memory, as the moon reflects
the light upon us when the sun has gone into heaven.
When writers like ourselves quarrel with earthly pain (we mean writers of
the same intentions, without implying, of course, anything about abilities or
otherwise), they are misunderstood if they are supposed to quarrel with pains
of every sort. This would be idle and effeminate. They do not pretend, indeed,
that humanity might not wish, if it could, to be entirely free from pain; for
it endeavours, at all times, to turn pain into pleasure: or at least to set
off the one with the other, to make the former a zest and the latter a
refreshment. The most unaffected dignity of suffering does this, and, if wise,
acknowledges it. The greatest benevolence towards others, the most unselfish
relish of their pleasures, even at its own expense, does but look to
increasing the general stock of happiness, though content, if it could, to
have its identity swallowed up in that splendid contemplation. We are far from
meaning that this is to be called selfishness. We are far, indeed, from
thinking so, or of so confounding words. But neither is it to be called pain
when most unselfish, if disinterestedness by truly understood. The pain that
is in it softens into pleasure, as the darker hue of the rainbow melts into
the brighter. Yet even if a harsher line is to be drawn between the pain and
pleasure of the most unselfish mind (and ill-health, for instance, may draw
it), we should not quarrel with it if it contributed to the general mass of
comfort, and were of a nature which general kindliness could not avoid. Made
as we are, there are certain pains without which it would be difficult to
conceive certain great and overbalancing pleasures. We may conceive it
possible for beings to be made entirely happy; but in our composition
something of pain seems to be a necessary ingredient, in order that the
materials may turn to as fine account as possible, though our clay, in the
course of ages and experience, may be refined more and more. We may get rid of
the worst earth, though not of earth itself.
Now the liability to the loss of children - or rather what renders us
sensible of it, the occasional loss itself - seems to be one of these
necessary bitters thrown into the cup of humanity. We do not mean that every
one must lose one of his children in order to enjoy the rest; or that every
individual loss afflicts us in the same proportion. We allude to the deaths of
infants in general. These might be as few as we could render them. But if none
at all ever took place, we should regard every little child as a man or woman
secured; and it will easily be conceived what a world of endearing cares and
hopes this security would endanger. The very idea of infancy would lose its
continuity with us. Girls and boys would be future men and women, not present
children. They would have attained their full growth in our imaginations, and
might as well have been men and women at once. On the other hand, those who
have lost an infant, are never, as it were, without an infant child. They are
the only persons who, in one sense, retain it always, and they furnish their
neighbours with the same idea. The other children grow up to manhood and
womanhood, and suffer all the changes of mortality. This one alone is rendered
an immortal child. Death has arrested it with his kindly harshness, and
blessed it into an eternal image of youth and innocence.
Of such as these are the pleasantest shapes that visit our fancy and our
hopes. They are the ever-smiling emblems of joy; the prettiest pages that
wait upon imagination. Lastly, "Of these are the kingdom of heaven." Wherever
there is a province of that benevolent and all-accessible empire, whether on
earth or elsewhere, such are the gentle spirits that must inhabit it. To such
simplicity, or the resemblance of it, must they come. Such must be the ready
confidence of their hearts and creativeness of their fancy. And so ignorant
must they be of the "knowledge of good and evil," losing their discernment of
that self-created trouble, by enjoying the garden before them, and not being
ashamed of what is kindly and innocent.
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