My little grandsons visit me at this becoming season of birds and apple blossoms. They accompany me to the brook, and are pleased with their willow whistles and sail-boats,--toys delightful to childhood from the first. Their manners, that first of accomplishments, delight us in return, showing that the sense of beauty has dawned and their culture fairly begun. 'Tis a culture to watch them through their days' doings. Endless their fancies and engagements. What arts, accomplishments, graces, are woven in their playful panorama; the scene shifting with the mood, and all in keeping with the laws of thought and of things. Verily, there are invisible players playing their parts through these pretty puppets all day long. To conceive a child's acquirements as originating in nature, dating from his birth into his body, seems an atheism that only a shallow metaphysical theology could entertain in a time of such marvellous natural knowledge as ours. "I shall never persuade myself," said Synesius, "to believe my soul to be of like age with my body." And yet we are wont to date our birth, as that of the babes we christen, from the body's advent so duteously inscribed in our family registers, as if time and space could chronicle the periods of the immortal mind, and mark its longevity by our chronometers.[5] Only a God could inspire a child with the intimations seen in its first pulse-plays; the sprightly attainments of a single day's doings afford the liveliest proofs of an omniscient Deity revealing his attributes in the motions of the little one! Nor is maternity less a special inspiration throbbing ceaselessly with childhood as a protecting Providence, lifelong. Comes not the mother to make the Creator's word sure that all he has made is verily good? For without mother and wife, what more than a rough outline of divinity were drawn? "That man," says Euripides, "hath made his fortune who hath married a good wife." For what would some of us have accomplished, what should we have not done, misdone, without her counsels to temper our adventurous idealism? Heaven added a new power to creation when it sent woman into it to complete what He had designed. [Footnote 5: "Infants," says Olympiodorus, "are not seen to laugh for some time after birth, but pass the greater part of their time in sleep; however, in their sleep they appear both to smile and cry. But can this any otherwise happen than through the soul agitating the circulations of their animal nature in conformity with the passions it has experienced before birth into the body? Besides, our looking into ourselves when we seek to discover any truth, shows that we inwardly contain truth, though concealed in the darkness of oblivion." Does atom animate and revive thought, or thought animate and illuminate atom? And which the elder?]