November 12th, 1852.—­St. Martin’s summer is still lingering, and the days all begin in mist.  I ran for a quarter of an hour round the garden to get some warmth and suppleness.  Nothing could be lovelier than the last rosebuds, or the delicate gaufred edges of the strawberry leaves embroidered with hoar-frost, while above them Arachne’s delicate webs hung swaying in the green branches of the pines,—­little ball-rooms for the fairies, carpeted with powdered pearls, and kept in place by a thousand dewy strands, hanging from above like the chains of a lamp, and supporting them from below like the anchors of a vessel.  These little airy edifices had all the fantastic lightness of the elf-world, and all the vaporous freshness of dawn.  They recalled to me the poetry of the North, wafting to me a breath from Caledonia or Iceland or Sweden, Frithjof and the Edda, Ossian and the Hebrides.  All that world of cold and mist, of genius and of reverie, where warmth comes not from the sun but from the heart, where man is more noticeable than nature,—­that chaste and vigorous world, in which will plays a greater part than sensation, and thought has more power than instinct,—­in short, the whole romantic cycle of German and Northern poetry, awoke little by little in my memory and laid claim upon my sympathy.  It is a poetry of bracing quality, and acts upon one like a moral tonic.  Strange charm of imagination!  A twig of pine-wood and a few spider-webs are enough to make countries, epochs, and nations live again before her.

January 6th, 1853.—­Self-government with tenderness,—­here you have the condition of all authority over children.  The child must discover in us no passion, no weakness of which he can make use; he must feel himself powerless to deceive or to trouble us; then he will recognize in us his natural superiors, and he will attach a special value to our kindness, because he will respect it.  The child who can rouse in us anger, or impatience, or excitement, feels himself stronger than we, and a child respects strength only.  The mother should consider herself as her child’s sun, a changeless and ever radiant world, whither the small restless creature, quick at tears and laughter, light, fickle, passionate, full of storms, may come for fresh stores of light, warmth, and electricity, of calm and of courage.  The mother represents goodness, providence, law; that is to say, the divinity, under that form of it which is accessible to childhood.  If she is herself passionate, she will inculcate in her child a capricious and despotic God, or even several discordant gods.  The religion of a child depends on what its mother and its father are, and not on what they say.  The inner and unconscious ideal which guides their life is precisely what touches the child; their words, their remonstrances, their punishments, their bursts of feeling even, are for him merely thunder and comedy; what they worship—­this it is which his instinct divines and reflects.