29 
TEN TO ONE CEUBS. 
Beloved of children, bards and Spring, 
O birds, your perfect virtues bring, 
Your song, your forms, your rhythmic flight, 
Your manners for the heart’s delight, 
Nestle in hedge, or barn or roof, 
Here weave your chamber weather-proof, 
Forgive our harms, and condescend 
To man as to a lubber friend, 
And generous, teach his awkward race 
Courage and probity and grace ! 
— Emerson , May-day. 
No longer now the wing’d habitants, 
That in the woods their sweet lives sing away, 
Flee from the form of man ; but gather round, 
And preen their sunny feathers on the hands 
Which little children stretch in friendly sport 
Towards these dreadless partners of their play. 
happiness 
And science dawn, though late, upon the earth. 
— Shelley, Daemon of the World. 
Anything that a man can avoid doing under the notion that it is bad, he 
may also avoid under the notion that something else is good. . . . Wean 
them (school children) from their native cruelty by imparting to them some 
of your own positive sympathy with an animal’s inner springs of joy. 
— James, Talks to Teachers , Atlantic, i8gg,p. 625. 
The relations which our child population shall assume towards 
our birds, and living nature generally, is a matter of tremendous 
national and educational importance. Personally I do not admit the 
evidence which is commonly adduced to prove “native cruelty” in 
children. But nothing is clearer than the fact that children are 
instinctively, incessantly, impulsively, explosively active; and, unless 
all possible channels of beneficent and delightful activity are laid wide 
open to them, it cannot fail to happen, as Goethe so well says, 
“ Nothing is more terrible than active ignorance ” (Nichts ist schrech- 
licher als eine thatige Unwissenheit ”). My own experience with 
children and that kind of nature study which has some high purpose 
in it, which really presents to their minds something well worth doing, 
has led me to repudiate and anathematize as a libel of childhood 
theories of “ native cruelty.” These are the loose conclusions of that 
