The Neihart herald. [volume] (Neihart, Mont.) 1890-1901, 1899-03-18
GREAT MEN AND BABIES,
Darwin Tickled Their Toes, and Mark
Twain Respects" Them.

IWaln respects" Them.
1t is usually the greatest men who
are attracted to infancy, and the wis
est of them can learn something from
the tiniest baby. Lord Tennyson, after
the birth of his eldest son, saws Pear
sons, remarked to a friend that he had
always believed the face of the infant
Savior in Raphael's glorious paint
ing, known as the "Sistine Madonna"
to be almost ~overcharged with express
sion; but that, gazing on the counte-
nance of his W little one. he had dis
covered his mistake. Shelley is not
often thought of as a family man, yet
the picture of the youthful poet with
his first born Ianthe is one that might
appeal to the homeliest imagination.
Its mother having given the little
creature over to the care of a nurse,
the new-made father, with something
of maternal sympathy would walk up
and down the room with it in his
arms, chanting it to rest with a weird
song of his own invention, consisting
solely of the o~ft-repeated word, yah
mani, Yahmani, Yahmani!" To Shell
ley a baby was not only a thing to be
lulled and warmed and fed, but a mys-
FERROUS stranger, out of whom he
would fam have wrung some answer
to the riddle of existence that perpet-
ually haunted him, and to which the
newborn seems so tantalizingly near.
PITY the babies are so closet" he once
obseryed-a statement in which the
babiologist of today would have cor
daily agreed with him. Darwin was,
perhaps, the first to lift the baby on
that platform where it has become the
cynosure of scientific eyes. Though,
Darwin being a right fatherly man,
one may be sure that the paternal spir-
1t was never absent from his ~investi-
cations. He could not, however, re-
sist the temptation of tickling the sole
of the infants foot when it was only
seven days old, that he might note the
effect, those pink toes of budding baby
hood, which, according to MI. Swim
burne, might tempt an angels lips
to kiss" responding to the sacrilegious
experiment by curling about and jerk
ing themselves away. The sounds
which to the fondest father is cause at
times of most unfatherly demonstra-
tions, baby's screams, was once eager
ly waited for by Edison, that he might
register them in his newly invented
photograph, the perverse infant, per-
haps taking the instrument for some
delightful toy, unfilially refusing to in
dulge its parents wish. Il don't ex-
actly love it, drawled Mark Twain,
IN hpinC nppcpntoI with bic G,.t l1..
"but'-edging away from the uncon-
scious bundle of innocence, whose adj
vent had occasioned such a CONFUSION
in his hOusehold-"but | respect it,"
Coleridge, in a letter to his friend,
Thomas Poole, confesses to a some
what kindred feeling with regard to
his firstling baby Hartley, at his first
sight of whom he did not feel the
thrill and overlooking of affection
which he had anticipated, but gazed
on the little one instead with contem-
plative melancholy, till, seeing it some
hours later in it's mothers arms, he
was melted to the proper mood, and
gave it "the kiss of a father" This ex-
~perience he afterward transmitted into
the sonnet, addressed to Charles Lamb,
beginning:
Charles, my slow heart was only sad,
when first
= scanned hat face of feeble infancy.
Boswell once in a spirit of bland and
childlike inquiry, asked DR.. Johnson
what he would do if he were shut up
in a castle with a newborn infant.
The sage somewhat unfeelingly replied
that he should not much like his COM
pany, though his humanity getting the
better Of his ire at the bare SUCCESS
ton of such a contingency, he pro-
ceeded to state how he would tend
feed, air, and wash it with warm
water to please it, not with cold water
to give it pain"