Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and HygieneHall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Science
Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene
Hall, G. Stanley (Granville Stanley)
Adolescence; Children -- Health and hygiene; Educational psychology
have developed into a great and true hereditary friendship, continuing
that which their ancestors had felt for many generations. The birth of
love in his heart was in a dream after having read the forbidden poet,
Alfred de Musset. He was fourteen, and in his dream it was a soft,
odorous twilight. He walked amid flowers seeking a nameless some one
whom he ardently desired, and felt that something strange and
wonderful, intoxicating as it advanced, was going to happen. The
twilight grew deeper, and behind a rose-bush he saw a young girl with
a languorous and mysterious smile, although her forehead and eyes were
hidden. As it darkened rather suddenly, her eyes came out, and they
were very personal and seemed to belong to some one already much
beloved, who had been found with "transports of infinite joy and
tenderness." He woke with a start and sought to retain the phantom,
which faded. He could not conceive that was a mere illusion, and as he
realized that she had vanished he felt overwhelmed with hopelessness.
It was the first stirring "of true love with all its great melancholy
and deep mystery, with its overwhelming but sad enchantment--love
which like a perfume endows with a fragrance all it touches."
It is, I believe, high time that ephebic literature should be
recognized as a class by itself, and have a place of its own in the
history of letters and in criticism. Much of it should be individually
prescribed for the reading of the young, for whom it has a singular
zest and is a true stimulus and corrective. This stage of life now has
what might almost be called a school of its own. Here the young appeal
to and listen to each other as they do not to adults, and in a way the
latter have failed to appreciate. Again, no biography, and especially
no autobiography, should henceforth be complete if it does not
describe this period of transformation so all-determining for future
life to which it alone can often give the key. Rightly to draw the
lessons of this age not only saves us from waste ineffable of this
rich but crude area of experience, but makes maturity saner and more
complete. Lastly, many if not most young people should be encouraged
to enough of the confessional private journalism to teach them
self-knowledge, for the art of self-expression usually begins now if
ever, when it has a wealth of subjective material and needs forms of
expression peculiar to itself.
For additional references on the subject of this chapter, see:
Alcafarado, Marianna, Love Letters of a Portuguese Nun. Translated by
R. H., New York, 1887. Richardson, Abby Sage, Abelard and Héloise, and
Letters of Héloise, Houghton, Mifflin and Co., Boston. Smith, Theodote
L., Types of Adolescent Affection. Pedagogical Seminary, June, 1904,
vol. II, pp. 178-203.
[Footnote 1: Pedagogical Seminary, June 1901, vol. 8, pp. 163-205]
[Footnote 2: Being a Boy.]
[Footnote 3: Story of a Bad Boy.]
[Footnote 4: A Boy's Town.]
[Footnote 5: Court of Boyville.]
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