into the most arbitrary of domestic tyrants, is to
treat him as though he were in mind, as well as in body, a miniature
man; feebler in intellect as he is inferior in strength, but differing
in degree only, not in kind.

Now the child differs essentially from the adult in the three respects;
that

1. He lives in the present, not in the future.

2. His perceptions are more vivid, and his sensibilities more acute;
while the world, on which he has just entered, surrounds him with daily
novelties.

3. He has less self-consciousness, less self-dependence, lives as a
part of the world by which he is surrounded--a real practical pantheist.

The child lives in the present, not in the future, nor much even in the
past, till the world has been some time with him, and he by degrees
shares the common heritage of retrospect and anticipation. This is the
great secret of the quiet happiness which strikes almost all visitors to
a children's hospital.

No one can have watched the sick bed of the child without remarking the
almost unvarying patience with which its illness is borne, and the
extremity of peril from which apparently, in consequence of that
patience, a complete recovery takes place. Much, indeed, is no doubt due
to the activity of the reparative powers in early life, but much also to
the unruffled quiet of the mind. No sorrow for the past, no gloomy
foreboding of the future, no remorse, disappointment, nor anxiety
depresses the spirits and enfeebles the vital powers. The prospect of
death, even when its approach is realised--and this is not so rare as
some may imagine--brings in general but small alarm. This may be from
the vagueness of the child's ideas; it may be, as the poet says, that in
his short life's journey, 'the heaven that lies about us in our infancy'
has been so much with him, that he recognises more clearly than we can
do

'The glories he hath known,
And that imperial palace whence he came.'

I dwell on this truth, because it is of great practical moment that we
should bear in mind to how very large an extent the child lives only in
the present; because it follows from it that to keep the sick child
happy; to remove from it all avoidable causes of alarm, of suffering, of
discomfort; to avoid, as far as may be, any direct struggle with its
waywardness; and even if death seems likely to occur, to look at it from
a child's point of view--not from that which our larger understanding of
good