The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought by Alexander F. Chamberlain (read full novel txt) 📖

thee up into trees, lest I change thee into one of these same worm-fish; for thou wast thyself a shell-fish originally, and I transformed thee.’ Manabozho then took up the little supplicant crawfish and her infant sister, and cast them into the stream. ‘There,’ said he, ‘you may dwell. Hide yourselves under the stones; and hereafter you shall be playthings for little children’” (440. 411, 412).

 

Games.

The imitation of animals, their movements, habits, and peculiarities in games and dances, also makes the child acquainted at an early age with these creatures.

In the section on “Bird and Beast,” appropriately headed by the words of the good St. Francis of Assisi—“My brother, the hare, … my sisters, the doves,”—Mr. Newell notices some of the children’s games in which the actions, cries, etc., of animals are imitated. Such are “My Household,” “Frog-Pond,” “Bloody Tom,” “Bluebirds and Yellow-birds,” “Ducks fly” (313. 115).

 

Doves.

Not at Dodona and in Arcadia alone has the dove been associated with religion, its oracles, its mysteries, and its symbolism. In the childhood of the world, according to the great Hebrew cosmologist, “the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters,” and a later bard and seer of our own race reanimated the ancient figure of his predecessor in all its pristine strength, when in, the story of Paradise lost and found again, he told how, at the beginning, the creative spirit

 

“Dove-like sat brooding o’er the vast abyss.”

 

In the childhood of the race, it was a dove that bore to the few survivors of the great flood the branch of olive, token that the anger of Jahveh was abated, and that the waters no longer covered the whole earth. In the childhood of Christianity, when its founder was baptized of John in the river Jordan, “Lo, the heavens were opened unto Him, and the Spirit of God descended like a dove, and lighted on Him,”—and the “Heavenly Dove” Still beautifies the imagery of oratory and song, the art and symbolism of the great churches, its inheritors. In the childhood of man the individual, the dove has also found warm welcome. At the moment of the birth of St. Austrebertha (630-704 A.D.), as the quaint legend tells, “the chamber was filled with a heavenly odour, and a white dove, which hovered awhile above the house, flew into the chamber and settled on the head of the infant,” and when Catherine of Racconigi (1486-1547 A.D.) was only five years old “a dove, white as snow, flew into her chamber and lighted on her shoulder”; strange to relate, however, the infant first took the bird for a tool of Satan, not a messenger of God. When St. Briocus of Cardigan, a Welsh saint of the sixth century, “was receiving the communion for the first time, a dove, white as snow, settled on his head, and the abbot knew that the young boy was a chosen vessel of honour” (191. 107, 108).

In a Swedish mother’s hymn occurs the following beautiful thought:—

 

“There sitteth a dove so white and fair, All on the lily spray, And she listeneth how to Jesus Christ The little children pray.

“Lightly she spreads her friendly wings, And to Heaven’s gate hath sped, And unto the Father in Heaven she bears The prayers which the children have said.

“And back she comes from Heaven’s gate, And brings, that dove so mild, From the Father in Heaven, who hears her speak, A blessing on every child.

“Then, children, lift up a pious prayer! It hears whatever you say; That heavenly dove so white and fair, All on the lily spray” (379. 255).

 

The bird-messenger of childhood finds its analogue in the beliefs of some primitive tribes that certain birds have access to the spirit-land, and are the bearers of tidings from the departed. Into the same category fall the ancient practice of releasing a dove (or some other winged creature) at the moment of death of a human being, as a means of transport of his soul to the Elysian fields, and the belief that the soul itself took its flight in the form and semblance of a dove (509.

257).

 

The Haida Indians, of British Columbia, think that, “in the land of light, children often transform themselves into bears, seals, and birds,” and wonderful tales are told of their adventures.

Hartley Coleridge found for the guardian angel of infancy, no apter figure than that of the dove:—

 

“Sweet infant, whom thy brooding parents love For what thou art, and what they hope to see thee, Unhallow’d sprites, and earth-born phantoms flee thee; Thy soft simplicity, a hovering dove, That still keeps watch from blight and bane to free thee, With its weak wings, in peaceful care outspread, Fanning invisibly thy pillow’d head, Strikes evil powers with reverential dread, Beyond the sulphurous bolts of fabled Jove, Or whatsoe’er of amulet or charm Fond ignorance devised to save poor souls from harm.”

 

Perhaps the sweetest touch of childhood in all Latin literature is that charming passage in Horace (_Carm._ Lib. III. 4):—

 

“Me fabulosæ Vulture in Apulo, Nutrices extra limen Apuliæ, Ludo fatigatoque somno Fronde nova puerum palumbes Texere,”

 

which Milman thus translates:—

 

“The vagrant infant on Mount Vultur’s side, Beyond my childhood’s nurse, Apulia’s bounds, By play fatigued and sleep, Did the poetic doves With young leaves cover.”

 

The amativeness of the dove has lent much to the figurative language of that second golden age, that other Eden where love is over all. Shenstone, in his beautiful pastoral, says:—

 

“I have found out a gift for my fair; I have found where the wood-pigeons breed,”

 

and the “love of the turtle,” “billing and cooing,” are now transferred to human affection. Venus, the goddess of love, and the boy-god Cupid ride in a chariot drawn by doves, which birds were sacred to the sea-born child of Uranus. In the springtime, when “the voice of the turtle is heard in the land,” then “a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.” If, from the sacred oaks of Dodona, to the first Greeks, the doves disclosed the oracles of Jove, so has “the moan of doves in immemorial elms” divulged to generation after generation of lovers the mission of his son of the bow and quiver.

 

Robin.

What the wood-pigeon was to Horace, the robin-redbreast has been to the children of old England. In the celebrated ballad of the “Children in the Wood”, we are told that, after their murder by the cruel uncle,—

 

“No burial these pretty babes Of any man receives, Till Robin Redbreast piously Did cover them with leaves.”

 

The poet Thomson speaks of “the redbreast sacred to the household gods,” and Gray, in a stanza which, since the edition of 1753, has been omitted from the Elegy, wrote:—

 

“There scattered oft, the earliest of the year, By hands unseen are frequent violets found; The robin loves to build and warble there, And little footsteps lightly print the ground.”

 

Dr. Robert Fletcher (447) has shown to what extent the redbreast figures in early English poetry, and the belief in his pious care for the dead and for children is found in Germany, Brittany, and other parts of the continent of Europe. In England the robin is the children’s favourite bird, and rhymes and stories in his honour abound,—most famous is the nursery song, “Who killed Cock Robin?”

A sweet legend of the Greek Church tells us that “Our Lord used to feed the robins round his mother’s door, when a boy; moreover, that the robin never left the sepulchre till the Resurrection, and, at the Ascension, joined in the angels’ song.” The popular imagination, before which the robin appears as “the pious bird with the scarlet breast,” found no difficulty in assigning a cause for the colour of its plumage. One legend, current amongst Catholic peoples, has it that “the robin was commissioned by the Deity to carry a drop of water to the souls of unbaptized infants in hell, and its breast was singed in piercing the flames.” In his poem The Robin, Whittier has versified the story from a Welsh source. An old Welsh lady thus reproves her grandson, who had tossed a stone at the robin hopping about in the apple-tree:—

 

“‘Nay!’ said the grandmother; ‘have you not heard, My poor, bad boy! of the fiery pit, And how, drop by drop, this merciful bird Carries the water that quenches it?

“‘He brings cool dew in his little bill, And lets it fall on the souls of sin; You can see the mark on his red breast still Of fires that scorch as he drops it in.’”

 

Another popular story, however, relates that when Christ was on His way to Calvary, toiling beneath the burden of the cross, the robin, in its kindness, plucked a thorn from the crown that oppressed His brow, and the blood of the divine martyr dyed the breast of the bird, which ever since has borne the insignia of its charity. A variant of the same legend makes the thorn wound the bird itself and its own blood dye its breast.

According to a curious legend of the Chippeway Indians, a stern father once made his young son undergo the fasting necessary to obtain a powerful guardian spirit. After bravely holding out for nine days, he appealed to his father to allow him to give up, but the latter would not hear of it, and by the eleventh day the boy lay as one dead. At dawn the next morning, the father came with the promised food. Looking through a hole in the lodge, he saw that his son had painted his breast and shoulders as far as he could reach with his hands. When he went into the lodge, he saw him change into a beautiful bird and fly away. Such was the origin of the first robin-redbreast (440. 210). Whittier, in his poem, How the Robin Came, has turned the tale of the Red Men into song. As the father gazed about him, he saw that on the lodge-top—

 

“Sat a bird, unknown before, And, as if with human tongue, ‘Mourn me not,’ it said, or sung; ‘I, a bird, am still your son, Happier than if hunter fleet, Or a brave before your feet Laying scalps in battle won. Friend of man, my song shall cheer Lodge and corn-land; hovering near, To each wigwam I shall bring Tidings of the coming spring; Every child my voice shall know In the moon of melting snow When the maple’s red bud swells, And the wind-flower lifts its bells. As their fond companion Men shall henceforth own your son, And my song shall testify That of human kin am I.’”

 

Stork.

The Lieblingsvogel of German children is the stork, who, as parents say, brings them their little brothers and sisters, and who is remembered in countless folk and children’s rhymes. The mass of child-literature in which the stork figures is enormous. Ploss has a good deal to say of this famous bird, and Carstens has made it the subject of a brief special study,—“The Stork as a Sacred Bird in Folk-Speech and Child-Song” (198). The latter says: “It is with a sort of awe (_Ehrfurcht_) that the child looks upon this sacred bird, when, returning with the spring he settles down on the roof, throwing back his beak and greeting the new home with a flap of his wings; or when, standing now on one foot, now on the other, he looks so solemnly at things, that one would think he was devoutly meditating over something or other; or, again, when, on his long stilt-like legs, he gravely strides over the meadows. With great attention we listened as children to the strange