But not only are the perceptions more acute in childhood than in adult life, the sensibilities are more intense. The child's emotions, indeed, are often transitory--generally very transitory; but while they last they produce results far greater than in the grown person. In the case of the latter, recollection of the past, anticipation of the future, or even the duties of the present, control the overwhelming sorrow, or call forth the energies needed to bear it. The child lives in the present, and this present is but the reflection of the world around, its impressions uncontrolled by experience, ungoverned by reason.
The broken-heartedness of a child on leaving home is not the expression only of intense affection for its friends or relations, it is the shock of separation from the familiar objects which have surrounded it; and I have not infrequently seen children inconsolable when removed from homes that were most wretched, or from relations who were most unkind. Every now and then, indeed, I have been compelled to send children home from the hospital because no love nor care could reconcile them to the change from home; and they have refused to eat, and spent their nights in weeping. The feeling is an unreasoning one, like the home-sickness of the mountaineer.
But, moreover, sudden shocks may sometimes overthrow the whole moral equilibrium, and disarrange the balance of the nervous system so seriously as to cause the death of a child previously free from any important ailment. Thus, I remember a little boy five years of age who died sixteen days after his father's funeral. The strange sad scene overcame him, though there had been no special tie between him and his father. He shivered violently, became very sick, complained by signs of pain in the head, for he had lost his speech, which he regained by slow degrees in the course of four or five days. Improvement in other respects did not take place, he lay in a drowsy state save when he called for his mother, and at length the drowsiness deepened into stupor, and so he died. I suppose his mother was right; she said his heart was broken.
It behoves us to bear in mind that the heart may break, or the reason fail, under causes that seem to us quite insufficient; that the griefs of childhood may be, in proportion to the child's powers of bearing them, as overwhelming as those which break the strong man down. Every now and then we are shocked by the tale that some young child has committed suicide, and for reasons which to our judgment seem most trivial--from fear of punishment, or even from mere dread of reproof. These facts deserve special attention, they show how much more the susceptibility and sensitiveness of children need to be taken into consideration than is commonly done.