The lot I most envied was that of the contented Shepherd Boy in the Valley of Humiliation,singing his cheerful songs,and wearing "the herb called Heart's Ease in his bosom";but all the glorious ups and downs of the "Progress"I would gladly have shared with Christiana and her children,never desiring to turn aside into any "By-Path Meadow"while Mr.Great-Heart led the way,and the Shining Ones came down to meet us along the road.
It was one of the necessities of my nature,as a child,to have some one being,real or ideal,man or woman,before whom Iinwardly bowed down and worshiped.Mr.Great-Heart was the perfect hero of my imagination.Nobody,in books or out of them,compared with him.I wondered if there were really any Mr.Great-Hearts to be met with among living men.
I remember reading this beloved book once in a snow-storm,and looking up from it out among the white,wandering flakes,with a feeling that they had come down from heaven as its interpreters;that they were trying to tell me,in their airy up-and-down-flight,the story of innumerable souls.I tried to fix my eye on one particular flake,and to follow its course until it touched the earth.But I found that I could not.A little breeze was stirring an the flake seemed to go and return,to descend and then ascend again,as if hastening homeward to the sky,losing itself at last in the airy,infinite throng,and leaving me filled with thoughts of that "great multitude,which no man could number,clothed with white robes,"crowding so gloriously into the closing pages of the Bible.
Oh,if I could only be sure that I should some time be one of that invisible company!But the heavens were already beginning to look a great way off.I hummed over one of my best loved hymns,--"Who are these in bright array?"and that seemed to bring them nearer again.
The history of the early martyrs,the persecutions of the Waldenses and of the Scotch Covenanters,I read and re-read with longing emulation!Why could not I be a martyr,too?It would be so beautiful to die for the truth as they did,as Jesus did!Idid not understand then that He lived and died to show us what life really means,and to give us true life,like His,--the life of love to God with all our hearts,of love to all His human children for His sake;--and that to live this life faithfully is greater even than to die a martyr's death.
It puzzled me to know what some of the talk I heard about being a Christian could mean.I saw that it was something which only men and women could comprehend.And yet they taught me to say those dear words of the Master,"Suffer the little children to come unto Me!"Surely He meant what He said.He did not tell the children that they must receive the kingdom of God like grown people;He said that everybody must enter into it "as a little child."But our fathers were stalwart men,with many foes to encounter.
If anybody ever needed a grown-up religion,they surely did;and it became them well.
Most of our every-day reading also came to us over the sea.Miss Edgworth's juvenile stories were in general circulation,and we knew "Harry and Lucy"and "Rosamond"almost as well as we did our own playmates.But we did not think those English children had so good a time as we did;they had to be so prim and methodical.It seemed to us that the little folks across the water never were allowed to romp and run wild;some of us may have held a vague idea that this freedom of ours was the natural inheritance of republican children only.
Primroses and cowslips and daisies bloomed in these pleasant story-books of ours,and we went a-Maying there,with our transatlantic playmates.I think we sometimes started off with our baskets,expecting to find those English flowers in our own fields.How should children be wiser than to look for every beautiful thing they have heard of,on home ground?
And,indeed,our commonest field-flowers were,many of them,importations from the mother-country--clover,and dandelions,and ox-eye daisies.I was delighted when my mother told me one day that a yellow flower I brought her was a cowslip,for I thought she meant that it was the genuine English cowslip,which I had read about.I was disappointed to learn that it was a native blossom,the marsh-marigold.
My sisters had some books that I appropriated to myself a great deal:"Paul and Virginia;""Elizabeth,or the Exiles of Siberia;""Nina:an Icelandic Tale;"with the "Vicar of Wakefield;"the "Tour to the Hebrides;""Gulliver's Travels;"the "Arabian Nights;"and some odd volumes of Sir Walter Scott's novels.
I read the "Scottish Chiefs"--my first novel when I was about five years old.So absorbed was I in the sorrows of Lady Helen Mar and Sir William Wallace,that I crept into a corner where nobody would notice me,and read on through sunset into moonlight,with eyes blurred with tears.I did not feel that Iwas doing anything wrong,for I had heard my father say he was willing his daughters should read that one novel.He probably did not intend the remark for the ears of his youngest,however.
My appetite for reading was omnivorous,and I devoured a great many romances.My sisters took them from a circulating library,many more,perhaps,than came to my parents'knowledge;but it was not often that one escaped me,wherever it was hidden.I did not understand what I was reading,to be sure;and that was one of the best and worst things about it.The sentimentalism of some of those romances was altogether unchildlike;but I did not take much of it in.It was the habit of running over pages and pages to get to the end of a story,the habit of reading without caring what I read,that I know to have been bad for my mind.To use a nautical expression,my brain was in danger of getting "water-logged."There are so many more books of fiction written nowadays,I do not see how the young people who try to read one tenth of them have any brains left for every-day use.
