other occasion the unexpected little phrase was
varied; the news of the war then raging distressed him; a thousand of the
side he favoured had fallen. The child then came to his mother's room
with the question: "Have you heard the saddest?" Moreover the "saddest"
caused him several fits of perfectly silent tears, which seized him
during the day, on his walks or at other moments of recollection. From
such great causes arise such little things! Some of his grief was for
the nation he admired, and some was for the triumph of his brother, whose
sympathies were on the other side, and who perhaps did not spare his
sensibilities.

The tumults of a little child's passions of anger and grief, growing
fewer as he grows older, rather increase than lessen in their
painfulness. There is a fuller consciousness of complete capitulation of
all the childish powers to the overwhelming compulsion of anger. This is
not temptation; the word is too weak for the assault of a child's passion
upon his will. That little will is taken captive entirely, and before
the child was seven he knew that it was so. Such a consciousness leaves
all babyhood behind and condemns the child to suffer. For a certain
passage of his life he is neither unconscious of evil, as he was, nor
strong enough to resist it, as he will be. The time of the subsiding of
the tumult is by no means the least pitiable of the phases of human life.
Happily the recovery from each trouble is ready and sure; so that the
child who had been abandoned to naughtiness with all his will in an
entire consent to the gloomy possession of his anger, and who had later
undergone a haggard repentance, has his captivity suddenly turned again,
"like rivers in the south." "Forget it," he had wept, in a kind of
extremity of remorse; "forget it, darling, and don't, don't be sad;" and
it is he, happily, who forgets. The wasted look of his pale face is
effaced by the touch of a single cheerful thought, and five short minutes
can restore the ruin, as though a broken little German town should in the
twinkling of an eye be restored as no architect could restore it--should
be made fresh, strong, and tight again, looking like a full box of toys,
as a town was wont to look in the new days of old.

When his ruthless angers are not in possession the child shows the growth
of this tardy reason that--quickened--is hereafter to do so much for his
peace and dignity, by the sweetest consideration. Denied