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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVIII.--OCTOBER, 1866.--NO. CVIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.




CHILDHOOD: A STUDY.


There is a rushing southwest wind. It murmurs overhead among the
willows, and the little river-waves lap and wash upon the point below;
but not a breath lifts my hair, down here among the tree-trunks, close
to the water. Clear water ripples at my feet; and a mile and more away,
across the great bay of the wide river, the old, compact brick-red city
lies silent in the sunshine. Silent, I say truly: to me, here, it is
motionless and silent. But if I should walk up into State Street and say
so, my truth, like many others, when uprooted from among their
circumstances, would turn into a disagreeable lie. Sharp points rise
above the irregular profile of the line of roofs. Some are church
spires, and some are masts,--mixed at the rate of about one church and a
half to a schooner. I smell the clear earthy smell of the pure gray
sand, and the fresh, cool smell of the pure water. Tiny bird-tracks lie
along the edge of the water, perhaps to delight the soul of some
millennial ichnologist. A faint aromatic perfume rises from the stems of
the willow-bushes, abraded by the ice of the winter floods. I should not
perceive it, were they not tangled and matted all around so close to my
head.

Just this side of the city is the monstrous arms factory; and over the
level line of its great dike, the chimneys of the attendant village of
boarding-houses peep up like irregular teeth. A sail-boat glides up the
river. A silent brown sparrow runs along the stems of the willow
thicket, and delicate slender flies now and then alight on me. They will
die to-night. It is too early in the spring for them.

The air is warm and soft. Now, and here, I can write. Utter solitude,
warmth, a landscape, and a comfortable seat are the requisites. The
first and the last are the chiefest; if but one of the four could be
had, I think that (as a writer) I should take the seat. That which, of
all my writing, I wrote with the fullest and keenest sense of creative
pleasure, I did while coiled up, one summer day, among the dry branches
of a fallen tree, at the tip of a long, promontory-like stretch of
meadow, on the quiet, lonely, level Glastenbury shore, over against the
Connecticut State Prison at Wethersfield.

Well, here on the river-shore, I begin; but I shall not tell when I
stop. Doubtless there will be a jog in the composition. The blue sky and
clear water will fade out of my words all at once, and a carpet and
hot-air furnace, perhaps, will appear.

       *       *       *       *       *

Nothing.

Then, a life. And so I entered this world: a being, sliding obscurely in
among human beings. But whence, or whither? Those questions belong among
the gigantic, terrible ones, insoluble, silent,--the unanswering
primeval sphinxes of the mind. We can sit and stare at such questions,
and wonder; but staring and wondering are not thought. They are close to
idiocy: both states drop the lower jaw and open the mouth; and assuming
the idiotic _physique_ tends, if there be any sympathetic and imitative
power, to bring on the idiotic state. If we stare and wonder too long at
such questions, we may make ourselves idiots,--never philosophers.

I do not recollect the innocent and sunny hours of childhood.[A] As to
innocence, the remark of a certain ancient and reverend man, though
sour, was critically accurate,--that "it is the weakness of infants'
limbs, and not their minds, which are innocent." It is most true. Many
an impotent infantine screech or slap or scratch embodies an abandonment
and ecstasy of utter uncontrolled fury scarcely expressible by the
grown-up man, though he should work the bloodiest murder to express it.
And what adult manifestation, except in the violent ward of an insane
retreat, or perhaps among savages,--the infants of the world,--equals,
in exquisite concentration and rapture of fury, that child's trick of
flinging himself flat down, and, with kicks and poundings and howls,
banging his head upon the ground? Without fear or knowledge, his whole
being centres in the one faculty of anger; he hurls the whole of himself
slap against the whole world, as readily as at a kitten or a playmate.
He would fain scrabble down through the heart of the earth and kill it,
rend it to pieces, if he could! If human wickedness can be expressed in
such a mad child, you have the whole of it,--perfectly ignorant,
perfectly furious, perfectly feeble, perfectly useless.

And as to the sunny hours, I believe those delights are like the
phantasmal glories of elf-land. When the glamour is taken away, the
splendid feasts and draperies, and gold and silver, and gallant knights
and lovely ladies, are seen to have been a squalid misery of poor