the sky, how his heart leaped up at the sight of the rainbow, how he sat at his mother’s feet and pricked into paper the tissued flowers of her dress, how he chased the bright butterfly, or in his tenderness feared to brush even the dust from off its wings, how he learnt sweet lessons and said innocent prayers at his father’s knee; trifles like these, yet trifles which may have been rendered noble and beautiful by a loving imagination, have been narrated over and over again in the songs of our poets.  The lovely lines of Henry Vaughan might be taken as a type of thousands more:—­

     “Happy those early days, when I
      Shined in my Angel infancy. 
      Before I understood this place
      Appointed for my second race,
      Or taught my soul to fancy aught
      But a white celestial thought;

* * * * *

     “Before I taught my tongue to wound
      My conscience with a sinful sound
      Or had the black art to dispense
      A several sin to every sense;
      But felt through all this fleshy dress,
      Bright shoots of everlastingness.”

The memory of every student of English poetry will furnish countless parallels to thoughts like these.  How is it that no similar poem could be quoted from the whole range of ancient literature?  How is it that to the Greek and Roman poets that morning of life, which should have been so filled with “natural blessedness,” seems to have been a blank?  How is it that writers so voluminous, so domestic, so affectionate as Cicero, Virgil, and Horace do not make so much as a single allusion to the existence of their own mothers?

To answer this question fully would be to write an entire essay on the difference between ancient and modern life, and would carry me far away from my immediate subject.[1] But I may say generally, that the explanation rests in the fact that in all probability childhood among the ancients was a disregarded, and in most cases a far less happy, period than it is with us.  The birth of a child in the house of a Greek or a Roman was not necessarily a subject for rejoicing.  If the father, when the child was first shown to him, stooped down and took it in his arms, it was received as a member of the family; if he left it unnoticed then it was doomed to death, and was exposed in some lonely or barren place to the mercy of the wild beasts, or of the first passer by.  And even if a child escaped this fate, yet for the first seven or eight years of life he was kept in the gynaeceum, or women’s apartments, and rarely or never saw his father’s face.  No halo of romance or poetry was shed over those early years.  Until the child was full grown the absolute power of life or death rested in his father’s hands; he had no freedom, and met with little notice.  For individual life the ancients had a very slight regard; there was nothing autobiographic or introspective in their temperament.  With them