Rensselaer Union, Volume 7, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 July 1875 — Advice to School-Ma’ams. [ARTICLE]

Advice to School-Ma’ams.

In an address to schoolmistresses at Cincinnati the Rev. Mr. Mayo said: If you would awaken the love of beauty in your children, you must in some way lie beautiful yourself. And every true woman knows she has it in her to be supremely lovely to somebody. Children go deeper than the outer face or form, and feel by a subtle magnetism the childlike love, trust, and confidence in the soul of their teacher. Thus your schoolkeeping may become the loftiest university to you, for there you are compelled to take yourself in hand and put yourself in communion with the heart and mind of childhood as the prime condition of success. It is true there are people who by nature are endowed with the gift of being beautiful to children. “Oh,

what a lovely school-ma’am we’ve got!” shouted a little girl to me at noon of the first day o| the new term. Pretty soon along came the new angel, seemingly a very plain young woman in curls, till a merry glance, launched from her eye like a shaft of sunshine from a loophole in a bastion of gray clouds, transfixed her little admirer perched on the garden waft and made one grave man sigh for old days of school-life again. The plain young school-ma’am in curls had a heart full of precious things for little Nell and all the other little folks over in the red school-house, and they knew it bv instinct. How often the children will leave the parlor, with its grand furnishings and polite company, for the kitchen, to hang about the cook, the man-of-all work, or some old codger of a Sam Lawson who draws the children of a village after him like the train of a comet. They recognize the childlike spirit under Bridget’s rough, red arms and Sam’s dilapidated hat, and follow it as the most beautiful thing they know. You may not be gifted with this attractive ’lower, which lays hold on children in this irresistible way, but something o< it is given to the dullest soul that is born into the flesh, and it is one of the deep mysteries of our spiritual .life that we all, by toil and consecration, and watching the ways of Providence, so get into accord with nature and the Holy Spirit that wc may become reconstructed into the image of whatsoever highland holy thing we most admire. And in proportion as you are what every young woman who deals with children should be you cannot help becoming lovely to them. God’s way of educating us into refinement of soul and life is to compel us to look upon and live with one who is to be a daily revelation of grace and nobility. So in these deep places of the spirit and in the daily life in the school-room you are awaking a faculty for the appreciation of beauty, without which all outward training and beautiful surroundings leave the child like a wild beast iu a flower-garden, or the man and woman like a pair of savages in the palace builded by his money and degraded by her vulgarity'. Once awakened this love for beauty will permeate every trait of character and adorn every act of life, as the soft dampness of the old English air dresses up the roughest hedge into a fluttering bank of blossoms, carpets the stone wails all over the Westmoreland hills with the tenderest fqrns, and veils the ugliness of the crookedest old stick dropped by the wayside with a garment of the most delicate green— This is an “ art culture” that is practicable for every child: the art of loving beauty and beautiful people and objects in nature and life. If this feeling of beauty’ can be once roused in the souls of this generation of school boys and girls; aroused by the love and loveliness of the young people set to teach and train them in the common school, we shall have the possibility of all desired growth not only in the artistic work of the hand, but in the higher realm of refined manners, and a society always nearing the golden rule.