Part 12

"Well, things that live and feel--living beings--always eat and drink; they continue to live by eating and drinking, and God tells them to eat by making it pleasant for them to taste things. Now these little birds lived by eating and drinking, and if they had been free, they would have found food and drink somewhere in the world; but those children had shut them up in a cage; and when they were so thoughtless as to go away and forget the birds that they had undertaken to take care of, the little birds grew hungry, and you know it is not pleasant to feel even a little hungry, but they grew hungrier and hungrier till their poor little bodies were as full of pain as they could be. Now our Heavenly Father could not possibly have them suffer so much pain, and so He told them to come to Him, and their life went right out of their bodies, and then their bodies were just like everything else that only keeps; they could feel no more pain."

"What a dear, dear, dear Heavenly Father it is!" said the child; "what nice ways He has about everything!"

"Yes," said I, "He has the ways of love."

He asked no questions at this time, nor made any generalization. I took up the book, and read on about the children's burying the bodies of the birds, etc.

Thus the death of the body was first presented to his imagination as only a relief from pain of the life that inhabited it. He was immensely interested, and the subject became the most common topic of conversation.

There were some books in the house which had pictures of hunts, and one was of a stag-hunt, the stag at bay, the dogs seizing him, the huntsmen firing. These books had been carefully kept from him. I now took them down, and showed them to him, interested him in the timid stag running for its life, and its ingenious devices to elude the dogs by swimming across streams, and at last when the dogs had seized it, or the huntsman fired the cruel shot which tore the breast or side of the poor beast, the final release, God's call of the life to Himself! At which the child would utter exclamations of delight: that final escape was _the best of all_.

This story was so interesting, it absorbed his attention, and he did not generalize. But it took its place among the good deeds of God's love, that when life became too painful in the body it was taken away to enjoy itself with God.

His mother, in whose presence were all the conversations, was intensely interested; but still as he did not think of human death, she hardly felt that he had conceived the idea.

I told him about the metamorphoses of insects, and their depositing their life in eggs as soon as they were born. When the old man came by, as he did nearly every day, we commented on the wearing out of his body, but he did not think of death as a relief for him.

At last one day it happened that stretching out of the window for some purpose, he nearly lost his balance, and it was only by my timely seizing him that he escaped falling out. I said, "F., what if you had fallen out on those rocks and been broken all to pieces!" He shrieked with horror, "I don't want to! I don't want to!" "But what if you had!" said I, calmly. "You came very near it. What should you have done?" "What could I?" he screamed. "What could I do, all broken to pieces!" "Why, don't you think," said I, smiling, "that your Heavenly Father would have taken you right into His own bosom?"

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 butterfly 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 assisting 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 God.

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 God 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 God 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 grass 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 circumstance, 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 association 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_ pronounced 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 classical scholar in college, and before his early death, had completed in manuscript 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 title of _After Kindergarten, what?_

But had I then known of Froebel'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 Agassiz called "_the American insanity_ of teaching children to read before they have learned the things signified by words," which he, like Froebel, 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_.