like in the delays of a child that any
exercise asking for the swift apprehension of later life, for the flashes
of understanding and action, from the mind and members of childhood, is
no pleasure to see. The piano, for instance, as experts understand it,
and even as the moderately-trained may play it, claims all the immediate
action, the instantaneousness, most unnatural to childhood. There may
possibly be feats of skill to which young children could be trained
without this specific violence directed upon the thing characteristic of
their age--their unreadiness--but virtuosity at the piano cannot be one
of them. It is no delight, indeed, to see the shyness of children, or
anything that is theirs, conquered and beaten; but their poor little
slowness is so distinctively their own, and must needs be physiologically
so proper to their years, so much a natural condition of the age of their
brain, that of all childishnesses it is the one that the world should
have the patience to attend upon, the humanity to foster, and the
intelligence to understand.

It is true that the movements of young children are quick, but a very
little attention would prove how many apparent disconnexions there are
between the lively motion and the first impulse; it is not the brain that
is quick. If, on a voyage in space, electricity takes thus much time,
and light thus much, and sound thus much, there is one little jogging
traveller that would arrive after the others had forgotten their journey,
and this is the perception of a child. Surely our own memories might
serve to remind us how in our childhood we inevitably missed the
principal point in any procession or pageant intended by our elders to
furnish us with a historical remembrance for the future. It was not our
mere vagueness of understanding, it was the unwieldiness of our senses,
of our reply to the suddenness of the grown up. We lived through the
important moments of the passing of an Emperor at a different rate from
theirs; we stared long in the wake of his Majesty, and of anything else
of interest; every flash of movement, that got telegraphic answers from
our parents' eyes, left us stragglers. We fell out of all ranks. Among
the sights proposed for our instruction, that which befitted us best was
an eclipse of the moon, done at leisure. In good time we found the moon
in the sky, in good time the eclipse set in and made reasonable progress;
we kept up with everything.

It is