I read within his heart : its throbbings said,

"How lovely is this world-how good, how fair!"
And for the moment my own bosom made,
Like his, an orison transcending prayer :
Then unto me strange memory did repair,
That I and that same child had once been one.

But soon again I changed to cloudy care,
Feeling how evil knowledge had o'erspun
My spirit, so that I far from myself had run.

This is the bitterness of the thought, of each man in his own
heart, I too was once a child—and in every thoughtful man's
case the heart knoweth its own bitterness, how bitter it is.
Other changes may be sad enough in their way—changes
produced by outward and trying circumstances; but it is the
inwrought change for the worse, the conscious decline from
what one has been, what one fain would have been, what one
fairly might have been, that gives the sharpest pang of all.
The mere change of blithe childhood into lone and withered
age has its own sterling pathos; and though humour blend
with descriptions of it in fiction or fact, the pathos is quite
patent to every kind soul. In Mrs. Gaskell's admirable
photograph of country-town life, the narrator is looking over
some old, old letters written by ancient Miss Jenkyns's mother,
soon after the said Miss came into this troublesome world
(out of which she was now just departed), and quotes one of
these misspelt pieces of affection, with a not unkindly but
matter-of-fact addendum of her own : "... the prettiest
little babe that ever was seen!'" affirms the letter.
mother, I wish you could see her! Without any parshality,
I do think she will grow up a regular bewty!' I thought
[this is the addendum] of Miss Jenkyns, grey, withered, and
wrinkled; and I wondered if her mother had known her in
the courts of heaven; and then I knew that she had, and

"Dear

that they stood there in angelic guise." It is essentially the same pathos, though accidentally the strain we hear is in the higher mood of chivalry and wild romance, that gives beauty and force to Scott's well-known lines, descriptive of the seeming Palmer-"the faded palm-branch in whose hand, showed pilgrim of the Holy Land.”

But his gaunt frame was worn with toil;
His cheek was sunk, alas the while!
And when he struggled at a smile,

His eye looked haggard wild.

Poor wretch ! the mother that him bare,

If she had been in presence there,

In his wan face and sunburnt hair
She had not known her child.

But, as we have said, it is in the subjective change, the moral deterioration, the lapse from innocence and a lofty idea to the dead level, or lower still, of the grovelling million,-in this it is said that consists the worst pang awakened by remembrances of having been once a child. And it is the mournful commonness of this experience which brings keenly home to all hearts, in its humbling truthfulness, the poet's apostrophe to childhood,

Thou vindication

Of God; thou living witness against all men
Who have been babes; thou everlasting promise
Which no man keeps.

The Norfolk Islander was once a child. The systematic, wholesale poisoner was once a child. The hoary Fagins, the rugged Bill Sykeses, the blackest blackguards and worst reprobates of society-shunned by her, banned by her, sent out of the world by her, each of these sovereigns in scoundrelism

was once a child. Nero, whose name is become a byword for all that is "base, brutal, bloody,” was once a child. The historian records of him-after saying that "the loss of his fierce and brutal father, when he was but three years old, was certainly no matter of regret," and that his mother, Agrippina, had a princely sense of the duty which devolved upon her,"The child was docile and affectionate, apt to learn and eager for praise." Like the parricide and suicide in one of Lovell Beddoes' tragedies:

A parricide

Here sleeps, self-slaughtered. 'Twas a thing of grace
In his early infancy: I've known him oft

Outstep his pathway, that he might not crush

The least small reptile. But there is a time

When goodness sleeps; it came, and vice was grafted
On his young thoughts, and grew, and flourished there :
Envenomed passions clustered round that prop;

A double fruit they bore; a double fruit of death.

What the Lady Erminia wails forth in the same tragedy, might equally avail for Agrippina:

Oh heavens !

Is this the son, over whose sleeping smiles
Often I bent, and, mingling with my prayers

Thanksgivings, blessed the loan of so much virtue?

It is a strong point with the novelists, this antithesis between adult crime, or vice, or meanness, and childish innocent promise. In one of Theodore Hook's fictions we enter within a prison-yard, and see the crowd of victims to offended justice walking, laughing, and talking, as if either uncertain of their fate, or careless of the event. "What a picture ! To think that every one of those doomed to perish by the hands of the common executioner had been nursed, and

fondled, and loved, and praised to the very echo, by his fond father and doting mother-the pain, the perils, that his parents had undergone to rear him; the anxious watchings of his innocent slumbers: the affectionate kiss with which at night they laid him to rest; the smile, the laugh,—his little playful efforts to speak-the joy that beamed in their eyes as he made progress, and could pronounce the endearing word 'father,' or 'mother'—and then to see the same beings hardened in guilt-the victims of vice-marks for the law's aim—retributive sacrifices upon the altar of offended justice." "He never cries or frets, as children generally do," the widowed mother of the future facile princeps of housebreakers is made to say, "but lies at my bosom, or on my knee, as quiet and as gentle as you see him now. But, when I look upon his innocent face, and see how like he is to his father-when I think of that father's shameful ending, and recollect how free from guilt he once was—at such times despair will come over me.” Everywhere we meet with similar cases, and see the child set in damning contrast with the man,

And the sweet records of young innocent years
Transformed to shame-envenomed agony.

Once a child—now a blackleg, now a redemptionless scamp, now a ruthless villain, now an obdurate convict, now a shivering wretch in the condemned cell—but, for all that, and before all that, once a child. Mr. Thackeray, in his Old Bailey sketch, on the morning of the execution, is careful to tell us of Courvoisier, when they bring him his breakfast" from the coffee-house opposite," that "he will take nothing, however, but goes on writing. He has to write to his mother—the pious mother far away in his own country-who reared him and loved him; and even now has sent him her forgiveness

and her blessing." For was not the Swiss valet, though a stealthy midnight assassin, once a little child?

Behold the group by the pale lamp,
That struggles with the earthly damp.
By what strange features Vice has known
To single out and mark her own!
Yet some there are whose brows retain
Less deeply stamp'd her brand and stain.
See yon pale stripling! when a boy,
A mother's pride, a father's joy!

Now 'gainst the vault's rude walls reclin'd,
An early image fills his mind,

the image of what he was in the bygone days, and of what the roof-tree was that once rang with his childish laughter. The blind pauper mother, in one of Crabbe's tales, relates how her "deluded boy" took his last ride to the gallows :the touch in the last couplet is thoroughly Crabbe-like in its painful realism:

Slowly they went; he smiled and look'd so smart,
Yet sure he shudder'd when he saw the cart,

And gave a look-until my dying-day

That look will never from my mind away :

Oft as I sit, and ever in my dreams,

I see that look, and they have heard my screams.

Now let me speak no more—yet all declared
That one so young, in pity should be spared,
And one so manly ;-on his graceful neck,
That chains of jewels might be proud to deck,
To a small mole a mother's lips have press'd,
And there the cord.

...

my breath is sore oppress'd.

In a later section of the same poem, relentless in its Dutchschool exactness, we see a highwayman in the condemned cell of the Borough prison, whose troubled dreams have some