The lives of the father and mother over-vault the lives of the children,
shutting out all care if not all sorrow, and every change is welcomed as
a new delight. Their parents, where positive cruelty has not installed
fear and cast out love, are the divinities of even the most neglected.
They feel towards them much the same, I fancy, as the children of
ordinary parents in the middle class--love them more than children given
over to nurses and governesses love theirs. Nor do I feel certain that
the position of the children of the poor, in all its oppression, is not
more favorable to the development of the higher qualities of the human
mind, such as make the least show, than many of those more pleasant
places for which some religious moralists would have us give the thanks
of the specially favored. I suspect, for instance, that imagination,
fancy, perception, insight into character, the faculty of fitting means
to ends, the sense of adventure, and many other powers and feelings are
more likely to be active in the children of the poor, to the greater joy
of their existence, than in others. These Frankses, too, had a strict
rule over them, and that increases much the capacity for enjoyment.
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