United States or Serbia ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
His passion for birds and beasts was the counterpart of his father's love of children, only displaying itself before the age at which child-love naturally appears. His mother used to read Croxall's Fables to his little sister and him.
The baby lips answered to his smile, and the baby tongue prattled in his ear with the easy familiarity which children extend only to those natures that hold the talisman of child-love. "And what is your name, my little man?" said Ralph. "Darling," answered the child, looking up frankly into Ralph's face. "Good. And anything else?" "Ees, Villie."
Come to me once more, my child-love, in the innocent beauty of your first ten years of life. Let us live again, my angel, as we lived in our first paradise, before sin and sorrow lifted their flaming swords and drove us out into the world. The month was March. The last wild fowl of the season were floating on the waters of the lake which, in our Suffolk tongue, we called Greenwater Broad.
He understood that the love which mates, which sweeps away all calculation, which welds, trusts, and never pauses to analyze or compute, is love that disdains mere admiration of intellect or lure of beauty. His quiet nature had depths. They had never been stirred till then. The child-love had been budding there ready for blossom. It had been fed by faith and ripened by association.
As different phases of the one Love, we see manifested, the strong, all-protecting, intelligent father-love, the tender, restful, patient mother-love, the innocent, confiding, trustful child-love, each complete in the whole, which can be recognized by all or one of these attributes.
But he choked it down, and picked his steps through scorched winter stubble, dead horses, men, wagon-wheels, across the field; thinking, as he went, of Grey free, his child-love, true, coaxing, coming to his tired arms once more; of the home on the farm yonder, he meant to buy, he, the rough, jolly farmer, and she, busy Grey, bustling Grey, with her loving, fussing ways.
This old man lives in the past and in the future; the early child-love of the father and mother who, eighty years ago, rejoiced over his cradle, remains fresh; he cannot 'any more hear the voice of the singing men and women, but he can hear the tones, clear over all these years, of the dear ones whom he first learned to love.
For there is something in the death of a little child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined either dead or living and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and child-death is the saddest thing in all the world.
It is so interwoven and identified with the mother's life, that she passes by almost insensible gradations from herself to it; and day by day the distinctive love of self wanes as the child-love waxes, filling the heart with a thousand new springs of tenderness. But that this benignant transformation of nature may be perfected, it must be wrought out in Nature's own way.
I tried to imagine my home without that bright and friendly little face, without the patter of those restless little feet, without the sound of those beleaguering little coos of child-love with which he used to burrow his head into the hollow of my shoulder. It was too much for me. I had to lean against the wagon-wheel and gulp.
Word Of The Day