nites them, but community of purpose. The father then
represents his children while they are under his tutelage, and afterward
they represent him, carrying on his arts and inheriting his mind.

[Sidenote: Parental instinct regards childhood only.]

These arts in some cases are little more than retarded instincts,
faculties that ripen late and that manifest themselves without special
instruction when the system is mature. So a bird feeds her young until
they are fledged and can provide for themselves. Parental functions in
such cases are limited to nursing the extremely young. This phase of the
instinct, being the most primitive and fundamental, is most to be relied
upon even in man. Especially in the mother, care for the children's
physical well-being is unfailing to the end. She understands the
vegetative soul, and the first lispings of sense and sentiment in the
child have an absorbing interest for her. In that region her skill and
delights are miracles of nature; but her insight and keenness gradually
fade as the children grow older. Seldom is the private and ideal life
of a young son or daughter a matter in which the mother shows particular
tact or for which she has instinctive respect. Even rarer is any genuine
community in life and feeling between parents and their adult children.
Often the parent's influence comes to be felt as a dead constraint, the
more cruel that it cannot be thrown off without unkindness; and what
makes the parents' claim at once unjust and pathetic is that it is
founded on passionate love for a remembered being, the child once wholly
theirs, that no longer exists in the man.

To train character and mind would seem to be a father's natural office,
but as a matter of fact he commonly delegates that task to society. The
fledgling venturing for the first time into the air may learn of his
father and imitate his style of flight; but once launched into the open
it will find the whole sky full of possible masters. The one ultimately
chosen will not necessarily be the nearest; in reason it should be the
most congenial, from whom most can be learned. To choose an imitable
hero is the boy's first act of freedom; his heart grows by finding its
elective affinities, and it grows most away from home. It will grow also
by returning there, when home has become a part of the world or a refuge
from it; but even then the profoundest messages will come from religion
and from solitary dreams. A consequence is t