Litchfield enquirer., 1837-06-08
From the Ne,D- York Mirror.

From the NeaD- York Mirror. -
 CHILDREN.-BY WILLIAM COX. "Theres not joy the world can give like thatitakes When the glow earthly thought declines in feelings 's not on youth smooth cheek alone the bloom that
 fades so fast,
 But the tender bloom of heart is gone youth itself
 be past"
 We do not sympathize with any man that sneers at children; that is, seriously-with hard, cold, deliberate sheer. It is we'll enough to bestow upon them the endearing epithets of plaques, torments, nuisances, miscreants, household mosquitoes, Ghrough the winter0 all which things, many a good time and oft, they most indubitably are. It is well enough when we hear of some dear friend having re- ceived an addition to his previous stock of nine, to draw down the corners of our mouths, and shrug our shoulders, and like the Phar- isee in Scripture, thank Heaven we are not as that man. It is we'll enough to shun as we would creditor, the dinner table of him who introduces his children with his cherries, or other fruits, and exhibits their precocious requirements before his unoffending guest. All this is quite right and proper, and there cannot be doubt, evenin the most humane dispassionate mind, that both for the sake of individual comfort and the well.being of so- ciety, decidedly spoiled child should be sufocated forthwith, and a divorce granted by the legislature against the parents, for fear of future similar results; yet, for all this, we confess sort of kindly yearning towards those little immaturities; and notwithstand- ing Wordsworth's profound saying
 "That he who feels contempt
 For any living thing. hath faculties
 Which he has never used that thought, with him.
 Is in its infancy"
 We do rather despise the man that looks with cold eye and curled lip upon group of young existences. His feelings are nei- ther reasonable, natural, nor philosophic; but pitiful in the extreme-' wondrous pitiful!
 There is something deep, mysterious, un- fathomable about children. They are the FUTURE. Men, our contemporaries, have been developed merits and demerits their qualities, good and bad, are before us. We know or fancy we know them. We laugh at their faults and foibles, their humors and pe- culiarities, and float carelessly down the stream of life in their company. Their fac- ulties have ripened, and no more is to be ex- pected from them; they are the ignorant present. But child-it carries the mind forward what may it be? The glory of hope is about it-the wonder of uncertainty. The hand stretched forward to us in helpless ness, may yet turn the current of a heavy fight;' or the tongue that amuses us with its small nothings, be ordained the applause of listening senates to commando True, expe- rience teaches us that the mass of children will be like unto the mass of men-a set of in- different, good-for little, good sort of people, crawling between heaven and earth,' who cat, drink, sleep, become fathers in their turn, and die but then, not being gifted with the power of divination, we know not but that SOME one of the young varlets we daily care- lessly encounter, may be the 'bright partic- ular starr that has yet to arise, shine forth and illumine the nations; and to whom we our selves, so wise and consequential now, so om- nipotent in comparison, may in few brief years look up to with wonder and admiration.
 What never-to- be e-fOrgotten thing, except with life, it must have been to have played with the infant Shakespeare, or to have reel ted nursery legends to the yet unbreeched John Milton to have smoothed down the hair over the baby brow hereafter to be adorned with the true round and top sove- reignty', or to have patted the head that con- tained the germ of Paradise Lost! to have had distant personal recollection ofthe boy ish pranks of the creator of Caliban and Mi randa, and Ariel and the Weird Sisters, or to have remembered the childish prattle, the imperfect utterance, of him who put appro- priate language into the mouths ot angels and archangels, and Death and Sin.
 We would not have given much to have witnessed the juvenility of the majority of your great heroes, or lawyers or politicians. Their clay is but as that of the common mass their spirits, in general, but little more etherealized. In all large congregations of children there are certain number of stub born, rebellious, audacious, contumacious rogues, to whom, as old Chapman says, their will alone is the rational.' These boys rob orchards, and refuse to cry when whipped therefor. Under favorable circumstances few ofthem turn out heroes-a goodly portion of the rest are hanged. Your lawyers and politicians, again, stand on the safe side of the wall the time the said orchard is robbed, ap- plaud the adventurous blockheads who have done the deed, and eat thebest of the fruit.
 Your great travellers, discoverers, and nav igators, sc. are those incorrigible truants, those torments to their relatives, who are ev- erlastingly perplexing their fathers, and set ting their mothers into mysteries, by their uTl- accountable exploratory propensities. These boys do not herd much with their schoolfel-