Thus the
saying of the poet holds true in a large degree, "The child is
father of the man;" or, as Milton puts it, "The childhood shows
the man, as morning shows the day." Those impulses to conduct
which last the longest and are rooted the deepest, always have
their origin near our birth. It is then that the germs of virtues
or vices, of feelings or sentiments, are first implanted which
determine the character for life.
The child is, as it were, laid at the gate of a new world, and
opens his eyes upon things all of which are full of novelty and
wonderment. At first it is enough for him to gaze; but by-and-by
he begins to see, to observe, to compare, to learn, to store up
impressions and ideas; and under wise guidance the progress which
he makes is really wonderful. Lord Brougham has observed that
between the ages of eighteen and thirty months, a child learns
more of the material world, of his own powers, of the nature of
other bodies, and even of his own mind and other minds, than he
acquires in all the rest of his life. The knowledge which a child
accumulates, and the ideas generated in his mind, during this
period, are so important, that if we could imagine them to be
afterwards obliterated, all the learning of a senior wrangler at
Cambridge, or a first-classman at Oxford, would be as nothing to
it, and would literally not enable its object to prolong his
existence for a week.
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