Say not that it has been a waste of precious moments , an idle matter , a babble of childish talk and a reverie of childish imaginations about topics unworthy of a grown man 's notice . Has it been merely this ? Not so -- not so . They are not truly wise who would affirm it . As the pure breath of children revives the life of aged men , so is our moral nature revived by their free and simple thoughts , their native feeling , their airy mirth for little cause or none , their grief soon roused and soon allayed . Their influence on us is at least reciprocal with ours on them . When our infancy is almost forgotten and our boyhood long departed , though it seems but as yesterday , when life settles darkly down upon us and we doubt whether to call ourselves young any more , -- then it is good to steal away from the society of bearded men , and even of gentler woman , and spend an hour or two with children . After drinking from those fountains of still fresh existence we shall return into the crowd , as I do now , to struggle onward and do our part in life -- perhaps as fervently as ever , but for a time with a kinder and purer heart and a spirit more lightly wise . All this by thy sweet magic , dear little Annie ! WAKEFIELD . In some old magazine or newspaper I recollect a story , told as truth , of a man -- let us call him Wakefield -- who absented himself for a long time from his wife . The fact , thus abstractedly stated , is not very uncommon , nor , without a proper distinction of circumstances , to be condemned either as naughty or nonsensical . Howbeit , this , though far from the most aggravated , is perhaps the strangest instance on record of marital delinquency , and , moreover , as remarkable a freak as may be found in the whole list of human oddities . The wedded couple lived in London . The man , under pretence of going a journey , took lodgings in the next street to his own house , and there , unheard of by his wife or friends and without the shadow of a reason for such self-banishment , dwelt upward of twenty years . During that period he beheld his home every day , and frequently the forlorn Mrs. Wakefield . And after so great a gap in his matrimonial felicity -- when his death was reckoned certain , his estate settled , his name dismissed from memory and his wife long , long ago resigned to her autumnal widowhood -- he entered the door one evening quietly as from a day 's absence , and became a loving spouse till death . This outline is all that I remember . But the incident , though of the purest originality , unexampled , and probably never to be repeated , is one , I think , which appeals to the general sympathies of mankind . We know , each for himself , that none of us would perpetrate such a folly , yet feel as if some other might .
To my own contemplations , at least , it has often recurred , always exciting wonder , but with a sense that the story must be true and a conception XXXXX its hero 's character .
As During by for from in of that though to