its day was may be guessed from the cradle of James I. that was shown in the Stuart Exhibition)—it has had its day, and is now departing into the limbo of things obsolete and forgotten, and thither probably in the course of years the swinging bassinette will follow it.
We have in this article treated of babies only when they are inarticulate, when none but the mother or the constant nurse can understand them. That is commonly reckoned by the stranger or the mere male person the least interesting age of all, but to the mother—and, indeed, to all women and grown girls—it is the most interesting. Then the baby's clinging helplessness, its wide stare of wonder, and its bright, human smile and crow of response to a kind look or tone, suffuse the female heart with an unimaginable delight. What pride is felt in the health and beauty and weight of the baby! ("Here's a leg for a babe of a week!" says the doctor in Tennyson's "Grandmother.") How his active crawling is admired!—and sometimes his singular taste for buttons, and marbles, and cinders! With what wonder and gratulation is the appearance of his first tooth hailed! With what expressions of joy is attention called to his first attempts at walking, and how "dear" he is when he first goes "pattering over the boards!" But beyond and beneath all these common phenomena the earliest infancy has ravishing mysteries which only the mother can patiently watch, and pore over and understand. Every day, every hour brings to her a new joy, of which she can speak to no one; for that which no else one sees—the waking attention, the dawning reason—the mother sees, and that which no one else hears the mother hears.
